What's Wrong - Explained

In a 2-party system, we kinda need both parties functioning well - especially when we have some pretty big problems to deal with.  Unfortunately, right now, there's something really really wrong with one of 'em.



Coupla points:  First, the GOP used to be my guys.  But then along came Iran/Contra, and Willy Horton and then Pat Buchanan's speech in Houston in '92. And holy fuck, Batman - that's pretty fucked up right there; so I just couldn't get with it any more, and besides, I had Clinton, and he was a pretty good Republican, so yeah.  Anyway...

...Second: In politics there's a rationale (rationalization is more like it) that gets used a lot whenever somebody in office is being pressured by the party bosses to vote in a way that "goes against his principles" - or defies outright the simple common sense god gave a fuckin' gopher.  They may not like what's happening (hell, they may not be all that crazy about what they're doin' their own bad self), but the psycho-trap they fall into is that if they're not in office, there's no way they can do anything about anything - so they gotta stay in office no matter what.

The most recent example is the vote against cloture in the senate when Background Check was up for debate.  Every one of those people was aware of the broad and deep public support for the thing, but "party discipline" required 45 GOP senators to go against the public interest (not to mention their own instincts) just so McConnell's Rat Crap Radicals could keep Obama from winning anything.  And the way it works is exactly what Ornstein and Mann (and a jillion others) have been trying to tell us.  "If you don't vote the way the party bosses tell you to vote, you'll have a very strong primary opponent in your next election blah blah blah".  No more power, no more honoraria, no more after-the-fund-raiser blowjobs in a hot tub, no more perks at all - Political Death.  It scares 'em, and it keeps 'em in line.

OK, so nobody doesn't know that, but isn't it really just a slight variation on ChickenHawkery?  Aren't they saying something very much like, "Yeah wow, the country's in a tight spot, and it looks pretty bad, and somebody'll have to take some pretty huge risks, but c'mon - you don't really expect me to go fight, do ya?  Shit, a guy could get seriously killed doin' that".

I've said it a thousand times - there's no soul and no honor in it any more - and now we get another reminder of why - because too many of these pricks have no real courage.

(hat tip = facebook buddy Doug R)

With A Bullet

Rocketing up the Alexa Website Rankings.

I'm takin' over the joint - 8 million-three-hundred-sixty-seven-thousand-one-hundred-ninety-fifth place!  Woohoo!

More From Chris Hayes

My new Bro-mance continues:

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It's A Sucker Move

Obama says if Assad uses Chemical Weapons, it's a game-changer.
Intel says somebody's used Sarin in Syria.
John McCain immediately hits TV saying we gotta make a move.

There's a lot to it, and I don't claim to know enough to make the definitive call, but remembering that it's never all about what they say it's all about, here's what I hear some of these guys saying:

The Neo-Cons - and the Neo-Liberals too - (for lack of more accurate identifiers) are pushing hard again for another entanglement in the Middle East.  And one of the benefits of pushing Obama into a war would be that it suddenly becomes a lot easier to play the Equivalency card.

So it starts to sound like, "See? Obama is no different than Bush or any Repub or anybody else - so you should all just throw up your hands, walk away from politics altogether, and be sure to stay home on election day because it's all just too weird.  It's ugly and they're all stupid and you're busy with your own shit anyway.  Just stay away."

That's one thing I hear.

Here's Chris Hayes breakin' it down:

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And here's the next segment:

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Junior Bush Wrap-Up

John Fugelsang recaps the GW Bush massive cluster fuck presidency.

This Can't End Well

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

We have a few options right now.  We still don't have to let our baser instincts rule over us - not the way these asshole banksters have done anyway.  But we'd better be watching very carefully for the flashpoint.  That special moment when too many people believe there's no chance to break 'em up, so they'll have to shoot 'em down.

I say it can't end well because even tho' there have been a few notable exceptions just in our own history, it's far more likely that the kind of power Taibbi's trying to warn us about is simply too seductive.

(ed note:  I carp a lot about "silver-spoon-legacy pukes" - Matt Taibbi is definitely not among them)

Today's Toon

From Tom Gauld:

hat tip = MoJo

Music

Taylor Swift can't make it sound like this because Taylor Swift hasn't the requisite soul.  Not yet anyway.

St Ronnie Speaks

This one's making the rounds.  Lotsa "libruls" expect lotsa "conservatives" to...uhmm... to do what, exactly?  Are they gonna lose their shit?  Will their heads explode?  Will they finally get it and change their minds?  Yeah - prob'ly not.

Deny. Ignore. Whatever. Move on.



hat tip = Addicting Info

Credulity Kills

From a friend's facebook post:

Seriously. This is the kinda shit way too many people believe.

There's been a lot said about Deliberate Ignorance in the Age Of Information, so I'll put it a slightly different way:  When you can learn almost anything you wanna know; at almost any time of day or night; just by having a smart phone and a decent cell signal; when it's that easy to look something up - you have to make a special effort to stay stoopid.

I spent maybe 3 minutes just browsing thru the first 20 or so articles (out of the 746 Million hits) that came up on a google search before settling on this one at USA Today:

Most victims of gun violence in 2010 were not on a battlefield or remote hillside in the Middle East fighting in a war. They were, like 6-year-old Brandon Holt, children and teenagers in America, according to the Children's Defense Fund.

Brandon was shot in the head by his friend and neighbor, an unidentified 4-year-old boy, on Monday night. He is now also a statistic of gun violence.

In 2010, 15,576 children and teenagers were injured by firearms — three times more than the number of U.S. soldiers injured in the war in Afghanistan, according to the defense fund.

Nationally, guns still kill twice as many children and young people than cancer, five times as many than heart disease and 15 times more than infection, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.