OK, I know this will come off as a little harsh, heartless and probably as deeply lacking in compassion or empathy, but let me say that, first of all, someone needs to say it, and why not me? Although I’ve lived in New York City since I was 6 (well, with a few breaks here and there), I was actually born in Oklahoma City. And even though I do acknowledge that it’s distasteful to mention this “so soon,” it has to be said now, before the vote goes to Congress.

So here the fuck it is: NO EMERGENCY FUNDS FOR OKLAHOMA. There, I said it. Sorry, but fuck ‘em. Why do I say this? Is it simply because their scumbag senators (Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoffe) dragged their feet for MONTHS on voting for aid for New York and the Sandy-impacted areas here in the Northeast? Yeah, that’s part of it. A big part of it. Is it because both of them ultimately voted AGAINST Sandy-aid to this area? Yeah, that’s a big part of it, too. But it’s more than that. Much more, and soon you’ll see it too, so give me a minute to make my case…

The first thing that should be noted is that Oklahoma is one of the biggest, fattest, Federal-funds gobbling hobo states in the nation, receiving $1.36 in federal funds for every dollar in taxes it pays to the federal government (It’s also the 10th least unionized state with 5.5% union membership). Meanwhile, my state, New York, received just 79 cents back for each dollar that we paid, and we paid a helluva lot more in taxes than Oklahoma did. In other words, it’s fair to say that New York keeps Oklahoma afloat. We pay to keep Oklahomans employed and we pay to keep up their infrastructure via the federal funds Oklahoma vampirically sucks out of our state, to the detriment of our students and our fucking roads. And yet, Oklahoma senators were stupid enough to vote against Sandy aid? Huh? WTF? Please don’ hit me massah I’ll get back in de house!

At least a good pimp knows to sweet-talk his working girls when he needs to keep the cash flowing. But Senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoffe are incompetent boobs. Their reverse NIMBY shit is for the birds: What happens in their backyard isn’t as important as what happens in mine? Come on up to New York and say that to our faces (Peter King is a moron, but he’s right some of the time...).

Let me pause for a second and consider that not all of Oklahoma supports that incredibly hypocritical Repuglicant policy. There have to be some counties that recognized just how insane and self-defeating their bullshit policies are.Right? WRONG. Lookie here. Yep. All Oklahoma Counties voted for Romney. They were ALL “red” counties. (And both Senators, of course, are Repugs. I didn’t bother looking up if there were any Democratic Congresscritters, though I think there might be a couple.) Let’s also remember that Romney wanted to abolish FEMA. That’s right. Every Oklahoman county voted for the dumb scumbag that wanted to kill FEMA. So let’s give them what they wanted: NO FEMA FOR OKLAHOMA.

Now you’d think this is bad, almost a case to vote against aid to Oklahoma, but here’s the kicker. The real thing that makes me fuckin’ angry. Let me put it simply…

If I built a shack on, say, active train tracks and then, shortly thereafter, my shack was demolished when a freight train came through, how would you feel if I asked you for some money to rebuild my shack on those same goddamn train tracks? Without a doubt you’d say, “Fuck Off.” Well that’s what we have in Oklahoma City, and believe me I know: Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas Panhandle are all a part of “tornado alley” here in these United States. Remember The Wizard of Oz? That was Kansas, kids, right next door to Oklahoma. In other words, they get lots of tornadoes there every year and everybody knows it. It’s not a surprise, and maybe not (arguably) due to global warming or anything. And yet they’re playing Russian roulette again and again and again, very frequently losing. And they want us to bail them out? (Fun fact: Oklahoma building codes don’t require basements because it’d be more expensive.) New York, meanwhile, has NEVER been flooded before. New York flooding? NOW THAT’S A FRIGGIN’ DISASTER and yet, Oklahoma voted against aid to New York? And now they want US to bail THEM out… AGAIN?

Fuck that. No aid to Oklahoma for the tornadoes. Sorry, folks, you shot off a couple of rounds at your golden goose and now we’re gun-shy.

Scram.

Fuck off.

Go ask your pals in Kansas for the money.

How to help Oklahoma tornado victims

 
Have you seen the offensive meme that the Tea Party.net people put up on their Facebook page? Cute ain’t it?

It got liked by over 68,000 people. In case you’ve got a 2x4 wedged in your eye socket, let me spell it out to you, the “people who vote for a living” are African-Americans, who proportionately outvoted Caucasian Americans for the first time ever in 2012.

It would be (too) easy to whip up an editorial tirade about this, but why bother when the “party” is going to be over soon enough anyway?

The glaring twin ironies at play here seem to be missed entirely by the dum-dum tea baggers: First, that the folks who consider themselves Tea partiers correspond pretty faithfully to the same demographic who still read newspapers in printed form and who are receiving, or who soon enough will receive Social Security benefits and Medicare.

Why not try to elect Republican candidates who will cut your own benefits so that billionaires can amass greater and great hordes of cash? Psst, hey Tea party people, the Republican party wants to cut benefits for white seniors too! [And guess what: SO DO MOST OF THE FUCKING DEMOCRATS—INCLUDING OBAMA!]

I don’t think those ‘baggers have really thought any of this stuff through.

The other thing is, who will replenish the Tea party ranks when these dickheads die off? Will this message resonate much with all of those recent college grads with debt up to their eyeballs, and no job prospects that pay higher than ten bucks an hour?

Some of the comments are pretty classic. What do you think?

See also:
Moms Working At Walmart Earn Less Than They Need To Feed Their Kids

 
The nation’s crazy Christian uncle-in-chief, Pat Robertson took to the airwaves of the 700 Club yesterday to defend the ESPN contributor who said that Jason Collins was “walking in open rebellion to God” for coming out of the closet in a widely praised Sports Illustrated column earlier this week.

ESPN’s Chris Broussard shared his doubts that an NBA player could be both openly gay and a Christian:

“If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, whatever it maybe, I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ. So I would not characterize that person as a Christian because I don’t think the bible would characterize them as a Christian.”

Why, that’s mighty Christian of you, Chris!

Yesterday, Robertson declared his agreement with Broussard, who he described as “somebody who’s brave enough to say it”:

“Somehow we’ve said if it’s heterosexual fornication, it’s bad; if it’s homosexual fornication — that used to be called an abomination in the Bible — now it’s a protected civil right. And so somebody that says that that kind of conduct is sinful is now being pilloried in the press. He’s telling the truth! This is what the Bible says!”

Robertson went on to call out “these media types” critical of Broussard’s comments, saying that they had chosen “a lifestyle that takes them outside the protection of God.”

“You can’t tell them if they want to go to hell or heaven, that’s their business. But don’t tell somebody that he can’t speak specifically about what the Christian faith says about certain conduct. There isn’t anything bigoted about that.”

No, no, Of course not, Pat. Just keep talking, you’re doing the Lord’s work with each and every batshit crazy utterance that passes through your thin lips, really you are…
 

 

 
Via Raw Story

I fantasized about punching this guy in the face as I watched this.

“If a dirty old man in a park showed ten-year-old children the graphic images Planned Parenthood pedals as education, he would be arrested. Planned Parenthood shows this smut to children and is awarded with more taxpayer money and the ability to determine the efficacy of its sex indoctrination, so it can get even more taxpayer money. It is time to stop this madness!”

It must be really difficult for a certain type of conservative Republican to watch Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible without wistfully wondering if they were born in the wrong century. The timeless drama, still widely read in US high schools, is, of course, is a scathing commentary on McCarthyism and a peculiar strand of American political extremism, but this would be totally lost on today’s Tea party dum-dums who would simply be envious of all that witch burning people used to get up to in Salem, Massachusetts! Their modern day bluenose counterparts may have to miss out on all that fun “mob rule” stuff they got up to in the 17th century, but the mentality lives on.

Take for instance the new “report,” produced by the “American Life League” (ALL), a feverish, mentally-challenged clip that aims to expose “Sex Incorporated” –aka Planned Parenthood—the bad, very bad, very horribly terrible, terrible people who EDUMICATE our children ALL WRONG and turn them into PREGNANT SEX FIENDS, GAY HOMOSEXUALS or WORSE. Why wouldn’t the heathen, Marxist smart people working at The New York Times and The Washington Post take their good, clean Christian American money to run their ridiculous ad?

Of course the “American Life League” knew well in advance that the Times and Post were never going to publish the video on their website, but that wasn’t the point. The point was instead to be turned down so they could send out a press release saying boo-hoo, “we were censored” by “the Left” and spread the word that way (See how that works? Calvin Klein ads in the past have used the same modus operandi, it’s a time honored public relations tactic). Stir it up and give the reichwing blogs something to get worked into a tizzy over, then follow that up with a statement, decrying censorship from the mainstream media (being seen as a martyr is good business for conservative causes) and well, you just have to read it:

While most Americans associate Planned Parenthood with abortion, this organization is also in the business of promoting a deviate and dangerous sexual agenda that in the long run will benefit the abortion giant’s bottom line, while creating a destructive and broken society for the rest of us.

Planned Parenthood has proven that it is a sex business that self-perpetuates itself by first developing obscene sex education materials that promote indiscriminate and risky sexual behavior to our youth through America’s public schools, families and community organizations.

The second step kicks in once the organization has created an environment of sexual risk-taking behavior among youth. It then markets and promotes contraceptive products and programs that have proven to be ineffective in preventing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Once the ineffective contraceptives fail, Planned Parenthood completes the cycle selling abortions to the teens it has sucked into its deadly cyclone. Tax-paying Americans who work diligently to contribute to strengthening our country are unwittingly funding the absolutely pornographic and child sexual abuse agenda that Planned Parenthood pushes on our society.

Planned Parenthood is like a drug pusher, don’t cha see, don’t cha see getting America’s kids into SEX—masturbation is the gateway drug—just so these PERVERTS can distribute condoms with holes in them and birth control pills that are really only SweetTarts and collect all of those PHAT ABORTION FEES! Planned Parenthood wants to turn kids into sex addicts. That’s the REAL plan of Planned Parenthood! It’s so diabolical that Satan hisself must be personally running the organization…

ANYWAY… so now cue all of the concern trolls who will write in asking me “So then why do you keep writing about these assholes? Just ignore them (and Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Louie Gohmert, etc, etc) and they’ll go way.”

You really think so, do you?

Stuff like this should be out in the open and it should be covered by the mainstream and not so mainstream outlets like this one. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said.

Personally, I think this LOL stupid video, and the group of twits behind it, deserves to have mockery heaped upon them. Seriously, watch this (NSFW) and tell me if this made you think their message was perfectly reasonable or BARKING FUCKING MAD…

This insane video does not help their cause even one tiny little bit. It would convince no one of anything except that the folks behind it are a bunch of fucking idiots. That’s all that’s being achieved by ALL with this comedy, they’re hurting their own cause in the process of spreading the word about it.

I’m quite happy to oblige them in pursuit of these goals. Enjoy!
 

 
Via Wonkette and WorldNut Daily

 
About ten years ago, whoever was managing Alex Jones at the time would have DVDs of Jones’ shouty “documentaries” messengered over to me at the Disinformation office.

I was already well aware of Alex Jones and sight-unseen, I already knew that this was not going to be something that I was going to be interested in, and especially not interested in investing any money into (the idea was that we would have manufactured it and distributed it on DVD).

Aside from the fact that they were obviously the products of a ranting and raving unhinged paranoiac lunatic with access to someone who knew Final Cut Pro, Jones used footage that there was no way he could have gotten the rights to use.

They were these long, like, messy video collages of fact, conjecture, crappy pixelated news footage and the jumbled-up logic, red-faced, bulging vein exhortations Jones is famous for. I will admit to watching them on the treadmill but they were always binned immediately afterwards.

In the intervening years, Jones has become a household name in some of America’s more gullible households, mostly due to Glenn Beck disgracefully elevating his profile on Fox News. Beck ultimately decided to cut out the middleman and unashamedly ripped off Alex Jones’ shtick. Oh yeah, Beck stole his act lock, stock and fucking barrel, went to the bank with it and then kicked Jones to the curb to distance himself from his hot-headed, foaming at the mouth mentor (and lesser showman). Jones does have a legitimate gripe with Glenn Beck, if you ask me, but it is Beck who deserves the blame for mainstreaming a kook like Alex fucking Jones in the first place.

Of late, Mr. Jones has been his own worst enemy, making himself into a laughingstock, first with his infamously berserk Piers Morgan interview on CNN and then again with his “false flag” accusations about the Boston bombing.

Jones makes outrageous predictions constantly. Is he ever right?

Nathaniel Downes at Addicting Info thinks Alex Jones is a fraud. That might be more than a little unfair to Jones—I think he believes what he says, he’s just fucking nuts—but he’s amassed an impressive list of some of Alex Jones’ greatest misses from 2012:

Worldwide shortage of rare earth metals – Didn’t happen
Food supply disruptions hit western nations – Didn’t happen
Deadly superbug mutation goes wild – Didn’t happen
New evidence links vaccines and neurological disorders – The opposite happened
U.S. power grid suffers catastrophic failure – Didn’t happen
Satellite breakdown – Didn’t happen
GM crop contamination leads to crisis – Didn’t happen
Honeybee population collapse spreads to other species – Didn’t happen
Weather patterns become increasingly radicalized – Debatable
Nuclear power sees global resurgence – The Fukushima incident discredited this
Nuclear weapons unleashed in the Middle East – Didn’t happen
New exotic superfood from South America emerges in western markets – Didn’t happen
A high-tech, portable vitamin D sensor device is invented – Didn’t happen
U.S. debt gets downgraded while world investors slash purchases of U.S. debt instruments – The debt was downgraded, but investors still flock to it
U.S. nearly comes to military conflict with China over natural resources – Didn’t happen
Huge new scandal implicates major pharmaceutical company in scientific fraud – Nothing out of the ordinary here
China unleashes armies of corporate espionage hackers onto western nations – Some debate on this is ongoing
Medical imaging scandal unfolds as older patients begin to show serious health damage from radiation via mammograms, CT scans and more – Didn’t happen
Another 9/11 false flag incident – Didn’t happen
The world won’t end on December 21, 2012 – Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day!
EPA pressured to regulate pharmaceuticals in the water supply – Can’t even contemplate this one without the brain hurting
Nursing home drugging scandal exposed – Didn’t happen
The psychiatric industry will declare more normal behaviors to be “disorders” – Didn’t happen
Vaccine industry goes crazy with new vaccines for all sorts of “diseases” – Didn’t happen
War on health freedom ramps up, targeting raw milk, homeopathy, herbs and supplements – Didn’t happen
The world becomes a far more dangerous place for honest citizens – So open-ended you cannot even evaluate
New attempts are made to destroy internet freedom – SOPA and PIPA have been discussed for awhile, so not a real argument
China’s boom will bust, sending ripples through global economy – Didn’t happen
Central and South America will drop the U.S. dollar as a currency – Didn’t happen
Local currencies emerge following the collapse of the dollar – As the dollar didn’t collapse, this didn’t happen
TSA suspends full body scanners after celeb photo scandal – No, was suspended due to dangerous exposure to radiation
Cell phone brain tumors start to appear in younger users – Didn’t happen
Medical industry claims to find cause of autism – Didn’t happen, although some hope has been raised
Terrorist strike on the U.S. water supply – Didn’t happen
Sperm count drops, infertility rates rise – Fertility is increasing, not decreasing, across the United States
“Stealth personal recorders” go mainstream – We call them Cell Phones, although Alex Jones is quick to claim that they cause cancer

Good times!
 

 
Rachel Maddow’s epic Alex Jones takedown from last night is quite amusing. She starts off all serious, but wait until the clips of feverishly ranting Alex Jone start. After that she riffs on him like the fool he is and annihilates him, but with her typical good-natured wryness. Jones is perfect fodder for her wit. Good stuff.
 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Alex Jones: DMT elves want the elites to kill us all!

 
Put yourself in the shoes of poor John Brennan, the newly installed CIA director as he is lobbed one batshit crazy question after another by GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. He’s trying very hard to be respectful, but it’s obviously very difficult to do that with such a self-important uninformed dingbat confronting him.

Bachmann’s first question, of course, was about Benghazi and it just goes downhill from there. At the end of the clip there is a full ten seconds of WTF looks exchanged as Brennan and his top men try to make sense of the Republican pol’s inane word salad.

It’s bust-a-gut-funny until you consider that she’s asking this question as a member of the House Intelligence Committee! Michele Bachmann could scarcely be considered “high functioning” let along intelligent!

Christian McCarthyite Bachmann will be attending the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in London this week. I simply can’t wait to hear what she will have to say about all of the anti-Thatcher protests. She’s probably going to be extra befuddled. I wonder if she’s ever been abroad before? She doesn’t act like it (Canada doesn’t count).
 

 
In yet another stunning example of, well, fucking idiocy—why look for an alternate way to state it, this shit doesn’t deserve the dignity, only cruel mocking—one of the top GOP officials in Georgia, Sue Everhart, the chairwoman of the state Republican Party there, told the Marietta Daily Journal that gay marriage will just encourage straight people to exploit the system to scrounge benefits!

“Lord, I’m going to get in trouble over this, but it is not natural for two women or two men to be married,” Everhart said. “If it was natural, they would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship.”

Everhart said while she respects all people, if same sex marriage is legalized across the country, there will be fraud.

“You may be as straight as an arrow, and you may have a friend that is as straight as an arrow,” Everhart said. “Say you had a great job with the government where you had this wonderful health plan. I mean, what would prohibit you from saying that you’re gay, and y’all get married and still live as separate, but you get all the benefits? I just see so much abuse in this it’s unreal. I believe a husband and a wife should be a man and a woman, the benefits should be for a man and a woman. There is no way that this is about equality. To me, it’s all about a free ride.”

Everhart said if she had a young child, she wouldn’t want them to have gay parents who would influence that child’s sexual orientation.

“You’re creating with this child that it’s a lifestyle, don’t go out and marry someone else of a different sex because this is natural,” Everhart said. “But if I had a next door neighbor who was in a gay relationship, I could be just as friendly to them as I could be to you and your wife or anybody else. I’m not saying that we ostracize them or anything like that. I’m just saying I’m against marriage because once you get the gay marriage you get everything else.”

Sorry Sue, but just like Chuck and Larry, gay people do want it all.

Via TPM:

 
Paul Horne uploaded this rather sad video to YouTube yesterday. Michelle Shocked showed up at one of her cancelled gigs in an act of defiance or protest or something. Apparently she was communicating only via Etch A Sketch and no one could be bothered to stop and ask her questions or maybe people were just uncomfortable approaching somebody wearing a hazmat suit, a condom-like cap and black duct tape across her mouth.

Horne describes his video thusly:

Michelle Shocked continues to unravel, showing up to her cancelled show at Moe’s Alley in Santa Cruz on March 28, 2013. Dressed in white, wearing a shirt that says “Gimme wit not spit” on the back and “Fun/Fag Palliance” on the front. She’s taped her mouth closed and is playing her guitar in the parking lot, to an audience of zero.

I guess this is what happens when even God stops taking your calls.
 

 
Shocked is hopping mad in this clip.
 

 
My wife recently asked me: “So why aren’t you writing any more of your political screeds for the blog lately?”

Some readers have written in and asked the same thing: When did I stop hating on Republicans, anyways?

I promise you I haven’t, but generally speaking, I get pretty burnt out on politics after an election year. This time, though, I think it goes deeper than that. The main reason I think I care less about politics today than I did only five months ago is that for years I’ve long expected to see a steep decline in the size of the GOP’s voter base and the party’s influence and I think that’s now pretty much a fait accompli. We’ve seen it happen. 2012 was the very last year that the Republicans still had a decent shot at getting in on a national level and cementing the rules of, ahem, “democracy” to favor themselves—but as we all know, that didn’t happen.

I certainly think there were very valid reasons for fearing the rise of the far right—the brief Tea party moment was admittedly not something that I saw coming—but I’m not feeling that so much anymore.

The Tea party foolishness, Glenn Beck, the birthers and the rapid rise and fall of Sarah Palin can already be seen in the rear-view mirror as the frenzied flailing of a dying elephant. By 2016, a pretty good chunk of the Grand Old Party’s aging baby boomer base will have at least one foot in the grave and by 2020 and 2024, well, forget about it.
 

 
In the very near future, America will be truly unrecognizable to itself, and this will be especially hard on the folks who don’t even live in the present to begin with. Progress cannot be stopped. Entropy is simply not possible in a country this big and with such a radically changing demographic makeup, no matter how certain personality types—low IQ authoritarians, xenophobes, racists, religious busybodies, I’m talking about the GOP base, here, of course—try to force it on everyone else.

I’m just so over it. Aren’t you?

The dam has burst on a lot of issues: immigration reform, LGBT civil rights, cannabis laws, healthcare, and the water is rushing past the reichwingers and they just got drenched.

This is not to say that I’m not still amused by soaking wet Republicans, it’s just that the 2012 election showed, I think definitively, the hard and fast limits to their influence and that the national brand is truly a spent force, one perhaps best left behind as a relic of another era (like plaid golf pants, Brylcreem, Lawrence Welk… or Jim Crow laws).

To my mind, it all looks pretty downhill from here on out for the Republican Party. Any argument that posits a resurgent national GOP moving forward is an argument made by someone who apparently still thinks that the most recent US Census was just a big ole fat gubmint LIE and who probably voted for Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Caucus.
 

 
There simply aren’t enough of them anymore. That’s a demographic fact, Jack. Don’t believe me? Go argue with reality, I don’t care what you think. Get real: The so-called “two party system” is not some immutable law of American political physics that needs to carry on without end, especially not when one of the parties has opted to radically remake itself, taking on the classic features of an extremist fringe group.

Some Republicans kinda got the “voter revulsion” message, but not really. When Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus presented the 97-page report of the RNC’s “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a post-mortem on the GOP’s 2012 losses at the National Press Club on Monday, he said:

“When Republicans lost in November, it was a wake-up call. And in response I initiated the most public and most comprehensive post-election review in the history of any national party. As it makes clear, there’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; our primary and debate process needed improvement.”

In short, a sizable majority of the American electorate thinks the Republicans suck eggs and their own internal polling backs that up to the extent that they don’t even try to spin it anymore! (Something remarkable in and of itself).

The report is actually pretty brutal, acknowledging that women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and the mainstream media basically hate Republicans. These, er, “special interest groups” are, for all intents and purposes, immune to the GOP’s charms. They’re not going to just suddenly jump on the Republican train for any reason, this much seems assured.

Not to mention:

“Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents…”

Yeah, the young people. They simply aren’t that into inheriting a country with insane wealth inequality, the 1% elite owning half of everything and keeping the productive capital within their own families, tainted meat, bad air and undrinkable water. Try rounding up an electoral majority when women, gays, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, college-educated Caucasians and young people of all races think you’re shit!.

‘Nuff said, eh GOP?
 

 

“We sound increasingly out of touch.”

That’s putting it mildly. The GOP talk about minority outreach, and then they introduce voter ID bills in their statehouses! It’s even a matter of Republicans appearing not to be able to differentiate fiction from reality anymore, let alone shit from shinola.

I mean, they’re exactly what Bobby Jindal said they—and by extension he, himself—are: “the stupid party.” Many Americans simply perceive the GOP as being closely synonymous with idiocy and they have no trouble articulating this to the GOP’s own pollsters. And like, this somehow appears to be NEWS to them! The stench of stupid is so thick on the modern Republican party brand that it’s going to be a really difficult odor to wash off.

Hands up, who wants to be a member of the stupid party? How about you?
 

 

“At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago—meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President.”

OUCH, OUCH AND DOUBLE OUCH! A knife thrust deep into the Republican heart! Why it’s conservative treason… even if it’s true!

They’ve had no new ideas since the Reagan era, either. Since before most people owned a personal computer. Since there were just three TV networks and PBS for most of America! Why would the smartest, most capable young conservatives of the up and coming generation want to make a career investment in the GOP instead of someplace… you know, not so dumb? How will the party attract talent?
 

 
And furthermore, how will the party raise money when they’ve proven to be such a shitty investment for their deep-pockets donors. Even the Koch brothers seem to be turning their back on the GOP. Who could blame them, they’re ruthless businessmen? They know the score. The ROI the GOP offer blows. Expect them to act accordingly. If Rand Paul would bolt the party for the Libertarians (as his father once did) the Kochs would be right there behind him.

“If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

Hahahaha. No shit. Well, then someone had better essplain that to the loudmouthed lamebrain from Texas, Rep. Louie “anchor babies” Gohmert, who insists that the GOP must never give into immigration reform because “they” will never vote for Republicans if offered a pathway to citizenship. It’s a “trap” Democrats have laid for the GOP, in Gohmert’s eyes.

Look, Louie Gohmert’s a fucking idiot, that’s glaringly obvious to everyone but him and his fellow idiots, but if you think about it, he’s actually quite right in this instance. It’s a real damned if they do, damned if they don’t sort of situation these Republicans have put themselves in regarding immigration reform, isn’t it? But they’ve insisted upon it, the Democrats didn’t trap them with anything. This is a giving them an awful lot of credit for what amounts to a Catch 22 that’s been hatching under their noses and in their own districts, literally for DECADES, don’tcha think?
 

 
As New York’s Jonathan Chait wrote about the RNC’s seemingly intractable woes:

The report determinedly avoids confronting the party’s most fundamental problem: Its attachment to an economic agenda that most voters correctly identify as serving the needs of a wealthy minority. Rather than confront the problem, the report is a detailed and generally shrewd plan for working around.

Yup. Tuesday on MSNBC, RNC chair Reince Priebus told Luke Russert that the party’s platform on gay marriage has not changed despite efforts to make the party appear more inclusive:

“I know our party believes marriage is between one man and one woman.”

That’s some “effort,” Reince (if that is, in fact, your real name).
 

Paul Ryan, the GOP’s pathetic idea of an intellectual…

Obviously there’s a gigantic problem with this entire RNC re-branding enterprise: It’s dead on arrival and anyone with a brain capable of critical thought on the level of, say, a peanut, can see the fatal flaw that’s got a flashing neon sign and a bunch of old coots in Revolutionary War uniforms pointing their replica muskets right at it. Republican voters, especially the ones who never went to college, the cranky old farts who are to varying degrees racist, close-minded Christianists, anti-immigrant homophobes and just angry, disapproving people, en générale, will have none of this shit!

And these troglodytes make up about half the party’s registration rolls and everyone knows it. Good luck with the fucking rebranding, boys.
 

 
Writing about the RNC autopsy at the NY Times, Thomas B. Edsall had this to say:

The highly visible presence of the candidates these voters prefer – recall the party’s Senate nominees in Missouri and Indiana, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, and their bizarre views on rape and abortion — suggests that the Republican Party has a severe, if not toxic, problem: a septic electorate that, in the words of the Mayo Clinic, “can trigger a cascade of changes that can damage multiple organ systems, causing them to fail.”

But let’s leave these trifling inconveniences aside for now, shall we? Suffice to say, there’s a major split occurring in the GOP that’s going to seriously impact their ability to ever get back to a place of national influence. This was already obvious at the start of the primary season. As a national party, they’re no-hopers within a decade, splintering into factions (Tea party and social conservatives, RNC establishment and the wealthy elites, “Ron/Rand Paul Libertarians,” etc) and facing an increasingly insurmountable demographic irrelevancy that will grow by leaps and bounds every four years.
 

 
I don’t think the Republicans can do that much—or at least as much—damage to the country moving forward. It’s clear that there are (at least) two factions of the party who are locked in a civil war. The endgame of everyone taking their toys and going home seems like a forgone conclusion. They’re just not going to be able to work together anymore. You’ve got the wealthy elites who would like the game to stay rigged vs. the Rick Santorum “stupid” folks. They desperately need one another to add up to a nationally viable party. Divided they don’t really amount to much anymore.

They’ve been humbled, their electoral impotency was on full display for the entire country to see on election night.

Furthermore. there are boundaries now that they know they can’t cross. Those boundaries weren’t there before, but they are now. Public opinion can be employed much easier as a prophylactic against the worst Republican power grabs (like this talk of changing Electoral College rules, something that everyone is already wise to). Of course, I’m not suggesting completely ignoring what the GOP gets up to—I’m not usually someone to underestimate the power of stupid people in a group—but their best days are behind them, and I think that’s a pretty uncontroversial thing to say at this point, without any caveats coming readily to mind.
 

 
I’m noticing that this attitude is increasingly, and I think correctly, becoming the default position of the mainstream media, that the uh… I guess threat of low IQ authoritarian Republicanism has diminished considerably. Bill Maher touched on this topic on his Real Time program on HBO last week when he mocked Christian bluenose group One Million Moms (the churchladies who protest the Skittles and Geico commercials for promoting bestiality) who have not one million Twitter followers, but fewer than 3000.

When Bill Maher is brushing off silly reichwingers as a source of comedy, like a canary flying out of a coalmine, hey, he’s probably onto something: They’re a joke.

It’s a pretty steep fall from Andrew Breitbart to Ben Shapiro to put it a different way.

The 2012 election was a real “man behind the curtain” moment for the Grand OLD Party and its increasingly tenuous relationship to modern America and the up and coming generation. The slow, agonizing death of the Republican Party seems all but certain, done in by hubris, idiocy, greed, hypocrisy, terrible ideas, loathsome shit-for-brains politicians, moronic uninformed voters, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the list can go on and on and on. They suck, but fuck ‘em, they’re not really worth nearly as much energy being expended in their direction.

Maybe it’s simply time to push past them and leave these nitwits behind to play in their sandbox of stupidity. The zeitgeist is not with the Republican Party and I think the big story of American politics in 2013 is that most people are starting to realize this.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The nightmare (free market) scenario the GOP faces: THEY’RE A VERY BAD INVESTMENT

The Republicans are way, way, more screwed than they thought!

Republican explains to other Republicans why the GOP is so totally fucked

 
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

—Tomas Young
 

 
The Crucifixion of Tomas Young (TruthDig)