Here’s a good article detailing all the childish gloating from the right. This is another example of how low our politics have sunk in recent years. Conservatives used to rail against liberals for alleged “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” but the contempt and hatred for Barack Obama has reached bizarre levels on the right. Frankly, they sound like a bunch of dumb teenagers taunting a rival team.
It’s hard to imagine how the angry right helps the GOP in the long run. The angry 30% of this country might get energized, but one would this this stupidity would turn off the middle.
Here’s “Tea Party” leader Mark Williams appeared on a CNN panel on “Anderson Cooper 360″ last night making a complete ass of himself.
It’s stunning to me how many conservative intellectuals have stood by and said little while the crazies have taken over the conservative movement. Some of them had the guts to take on Sarah Palin, and more are starting to speak up as idiots like Joe the Plumber and demagogues like Glenn Beck become the new faces of conservatism.
David Frum has been one of the loudest voices of sanity on the right, and he takes on Glenn Beck in his latest column.
We conservatives are submitting our movement to some of the most unscrupulous people in American life. This submission disgraces conservatism, discredits Republicans, and damages the country. It’s beyond time for conservatives who know better to join us at NewMajority in emancipating ourselves from leadership by the most stupid, the most cynical, and the most truthless.
The entire column is worth reading, as Frum defends Cass Sunstein against Beck’s hysterical fire.
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
This is what the right in America has come to, which shouldn’t be a surprise when one celebrates ignorance and mediocrity.
At least someone at CNN has some journalistic integrity left. Next, they need to get rid of Dobbs.
CNN President Jon Klein wrote an email last night to “Lou Dobbs Tonight” staffers telling them the Obama birth certificate story is “dead,” TVNewser reports.
“It seems this story is dead,” Klein wrote, “because anyone who still is not convinced doesn’t really have a legitimate beef.”
CNN focused on the additional information that all Hawaii records are now electronic, so they don’t produce paper copies of “original” birth certificates.
Will this end the story? Don’t bet on it. The level of hatred on the right for Obama is reaching a fever pitch.
UPDATE: A civil rights organization is demanding that CNN remove Lou Dobbs from the air.
Since Barack Obama announced his candidacy for President, we’ve seen the lunatic fringe on the right push the limits of idiocy. Since his election, the levels of insanity on the right have grown exponentially.
The “birther” movement has set a new standard, even by the standards of the loony right wing. They make the teabaggers looks like sober economic scholars.
Pay particular attention to his smackdown of Lou Dobbs, who brings up “questions” surrounding Obama’s place of birth several days after a guest host ON HIS OWN SHOW completely debunks the asinine story. Further proof that Lou Dobbs is a complete buffoon. Why is this clown still on CNN?
They’re now concerned about banning part-human, part-animal creatures. Apparently they’ve been watching True Blood and they’re worried about human-animal hybrids. Keith Olbermann offers up the ridicule they deserve.
MSNBC is having a field day with this one. See how many double entendres you can find in the following clip. Hint – Dick Armey is one of the easy ones!
It’s stunning how far the GOP has fallen. We expected some turmoil after the party got smoked in 2006 and then again in 2008, but this is getting ridiculous.
Putting aside for a moment the hilarious ass-kissing taking place as Michael Steele and other Republicans bend to Rush Limbaugh’s knee. The GOP leadership in Congress has decided they want to play their own part in making the party look like a bunch of buffoons.
The latest and greatest idea coming from Republican geniuses like John Boehner is the “spending freeze.” Basically, their actually TRYING to sound like Herbert Hoover.
Someone has decided that Republicans need to “rebrand” themselves as spending hawks, but they’re putting that political effort over the need to drag this economy out of a recession. They can certainly argue about spending, and they can vote no on all spending bills to make their point, but a spending freeze in an economic downturn is moronic.
The Republicans deserve to be in the minority. They deserve a chairman like Michael Steele who thinks he’s the coolest man alive but who puts his foot in his mouth every day. Finally, they deserve a blowhard spokesman like Rush Limbaugh who dresses like Johnny Cash and does his best to alienate two-thirds of the country.
Meanwhile, Newsweek just released a new poll that has President Obama’s approval rating at 72%.
It’s quite an accomplishment to be the dumbest person on a business network that completely missed the financial crisis, but Melissa Francis takes the cake. She argues like a teenager, like today when she became totally fixated on a 30-point drop in the Dow while Obama was speaking, conveniently ignoring that the market had been up over 100 points, and had given back those gains just as Obama began speaking (meaning that the trend was down as he began speaking). Anyone with half a brain knows that swings in the market in the short term are often not rational. The market is rational over the long term, not the short term. Steve Leesman was totally exacerbated as he tried to reason with her to no avail. I’m sure he would have told her to shut the f%#& up if they weren’t on the air. It was one of the most embarrassing exchanges I’ve seen on a network that has come to be known for it’s inability to understand the financial markets it’s supposed to cover.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of “analysis” we’ve come to expect on CNBC. Commentators like Larry Kudlow have one answer to everything – lower taxes on the wealthy. Idiots like Jim Cramer scream about socialism, even though he supported Obama in the fall. They’re becoming the Sarah Palin of financial analysis.
There are so many examples of how this party has completely lost its way, but this news item takes the cake.
A group of 31 House Republicans have introduced a resolution “declaring victory in Iraq,” which is bound to evoke images of “Mission Accomplished” and George W. Bush in a flight suit.
The intention of the resolution isn’t actually celebratory. It’s intended to set a political trap by declaring, six weeks into Obama’s presidency, that all responsibility for the six-year conflict, which was initiated by President Bush on flawed evidence and incompetently pursued for much of his presidency, is now Obama’s to lose.
These guys are complete morons. It’s amazing that they would try to declare victory when we still have 150,000 troops in Iraq and the Iraqi government needs to hide from its own people behind our army in the Green Zone!
This is pure politics, but it’s also dumb politics. The GOP is turning into a sideshow.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), a strong supporter of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, is launching a full-on battle this week to remove several provisions from the 2009 government spending bill that would open a small crack in the slammed door of relations with Havana.
Menendez fired a broadside at the Obama administration yesterday for backing a provision buried in the $410 billion spending bill, which must become law by next week in order to keep the government running. The New Jersey senator, a Cuban-American, objects to language in the bill that would allow Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island once a year and end limits on the sale of American food and medicines in Cuba.
Menendez even suggested yesterday that he might oppose the spending bill if the Cuba provisions were not removed, saying in a floor speech that they “[put] the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide.”
Polls suggest that the majority of Cuban-Americans side with the administration, rather than Menendez — an influential poll of the community, conducted in Florida every year since 1991, found in December that 55% of Cuban-Americans supported lifting the embargo against Havana.
This is a perfect example of why it’s so damn hard to govern. Guys like Menendez who have a personal agenda can muck things up for the governing party, even when he’s outnumbered on an issue. The blogs and cable shows need to go after this guy and highlight these tactics.
This might be a case of CNN predicting a fight that won’t take place, but conservatives and Republicans are crazy if they pick this fight now.
Analysts suspected that Obama would face a battle over abortion if and when he makes a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, but religious conservatives could use Sebelius as a warm-up for the seemingly inevitable fight.
Calling Sebelius an “enemy of the unborn,” Catholic League President Bill Donohue said the Kansas governor’s nomination is particularly disturbing because the health and human services secretary is one of the few members of the administration who can directly affect abortion policy.
“Sebelius’ support for abortion is so far off the charts that she has been publicly criticized by the last three archbishops of Kansas City,” Donohue said in a statement. Video Watch why filling the Cabinet post is urgent task »
The liberal group Catholics United has come to Sebelius’ defense, saying the Kansas governor has taken several steps to lower the abortion rate in her state. The group also has posted excerpts of a 2006 speech in which Sebelius said she opposed abortion.
“My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong,” she said then. “However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of abortions in our nation.”
In May, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, said that Sebelius’ stance on abortion had “grave spiritual and moral consequences.” He asked that Sebelius no longer receive Communion until she repudiated her stance and made a “worthy sacramental confession.”
Naumann was reacting to Sebelius’ veto of state Senate Bill 389 and the subsequent House version, titled the Comprehensive Abortion Reform Act, either of which would have tightened abortion regulations in Kansas.
In shooting down SB 389 in April, Sebelius wrote that the bill was problematic because it included no exceptions for pregnancies that endanger a woman’s life and it allowed for individuals to seek court orders preventing a woman from obtaining an abortion, even if the procedure was necessary to save her life.
“I am concerned that the bill is likely unconstitutional, or even worse, endangers the lives of women,” Sebelius said in a statement.
She further said that Kansas had striven to lower its abortion rates through adoption incentives, extended health services for pregnant women, sex education and support services for families.
Another lightning rod for Sebelius is a 2007 reception she held for Dr. George Tiller at the governor’s mansion in Topeka. Tiller, who specializes in late-term abortions and who once received the National Abortion Federation’s highest honor, is presently facing charges relating to his practice.
Last month, a district judge denied a motion to dismiss the case, meaning Tiller will go to trial on 19 misdemeanor counts relating to how he procured second opinions for late-term abortions, according to The Wichita Eagle.
Though Sebelius is dogged by many on the religious right, GOP Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts of Kansas seem willing to give her a pass on her stance on abortion.
Brownback, who sought the GOP presidential nomination and is one of the leading anti-abortion voices in the Senate, recently released a statement with Roberts, congratulating Sebelius and expressing an eagerness to work with their fellow Kansan on health issues.
The reactions from Brownback and Roberts suggest that cooler heads will prevail, and that we won’t get a sideshow on abortion at a time when both sides will be debating health care reform.
Sarah Palin was interviewed in connection with an upcoming documentary from a conservative filmmaker about the 2008 presidential campaign. Some on the right are obsessed with the notion that the media was unfair to Palin, even when considering that Palin refused to hold a single news conference to address all the media reports she found to be unfair.
Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) believes Caroline Kennedy is getting softer press treatment in her pursuit of the New York Senate seat than Palin did as the GOP vice presidential nominee because of Kennedy’s social class.
“I’ve been interested to see how Caroline Kennedy will be handled and if she will be handled with kid gloves or if she will be under such a microscope,” Palin told conservative filmmaker John Ziegler during an interview Monday for his upcoming documentary film, “How Obama Got Elected.” Excerpts from the interview were posted on YouTube Wednesday evening.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out and I think that as we watch that we will perhaps be able to prove that there is a class issue here also that was such a factor in the scrutiny of my candidacy versus, say, the scrutiny of what her candidacy may be.”
Palin said she remains subject to unfair press coverage of her and her family.
“Is it political? Is it sexism?” she asked. “What is it that drives someone to believe the worst and perpetuate the worst in terms of gossip and lies?”
She observed that Katie Couric and Tina Fey have been “capitalizing on” and “exploiting” her.
“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen,” she said. “And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”
Her discussion of Caroline Kennedy is ridiculous. Sarah Palin wanted to be Vice President, which would have put her one heartbeat away from the most powerful position on the planet. She was an unknown figure, and when given the opportunity to speak without notes, she came across as a bumbling fool. It’s only natural that she would have faced a media frenzy. That was the whole point behind her selection. John McCain needed to create a buzz, and she provided that buzz. She just didn’t have the ability to address the issues facing our nation in a coherent manner. That’s her fault and John McCain’s fault. She’s trying to blame the media, and she’s trying to avoid the real issues by discussing the media’s obsession with her family (they do that to everyone, including the Clintons and the Kennedys), but in the end she’s the one who blew it.
Caroline Kennedy might be appointed to the Senate. That is completely different from the Vice Presidency. There she will be one of 100 Senators. If Sarah Palin wanted to be a Senator, she would not face the same level of media scrutiny as she faced as John McCain’s running mate. Frankly, Sarah Palin, despite her obvious shortcomings, is herself qualified to be a Senator, just like Caroline Kennedy.
Of course, Sarah Palin and her supporters will never acknowledge that distinction. They play the victim card just as good as anyone on the left. First, everyone who questioned her was sexist. Now she’s bringing up class. Conservatives used to mock those on the left who wallowed in victim-style politics, and now they’re doing the same thing. It’s pathetic, and it just might keep them in the minority for years to come.
