Charles Simic really lets it fly with his scathing polemic, “Age of Ignorance” on The New York Review of Books’ blog. Over a lifetime of teaching college level American literature courses and watching aghast as each subsequent crop of students washed ashore dumber than the crew the year before, Simic has seen firsthand what the reichwing’s war on education has wrought and it ain’t pretty.
It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore The Great IQ Stratification—for what else could you call it?—that’s taken place in America over the past 40 years. Idiocy is the American way of life. Stupidity r “us” or more pointedly “U.S”?
No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?
In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by conservative politicians and ideologues as “Real Americans” defending their country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth:
Christians are persecuted in this country.
The government is coming to get your guns.
Obama is a Muslim.
Global Warming is a hoax.
The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.
Schools push a left-wing agenda.
Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.
Obama hates white people.
The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.
The safety net contributes to poverty.
The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control.
One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces,” Sidney Hook said once. No doubt. What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect. That’s why they love politicians who rail against teachers indoctrinating children against their parents’ values and resent the ones who show ability to think seriously and independently. Despite their bravado, these fools can always be counted on to vote against their self-interest. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is why millions are being spent to keep my fellow citizens ignorant.
You’ll note that Simic’s list contains only idiotic rightwing beliefs which are commonly held only in red states where people tend to be the most religious. Coincidence? I think not…
And it will only continue to get worse. Who reading this thinks it will get better in our lifetime?
If you want to know exactly how fucking deliriously insane the modern Republican party has become—in writing, no less—look no further than the “pledge” candidates must sign in order to represent the Laurens County Republican Party in South Carolina.
If you want a spot on the primary ballot, the GOP bürgermeisters there want assurances from you that you’ve not had pre-marital sex (and won’t)— and that you will never, ever look at online porn again. They unanimously (UNANIMOUSLY!!!) approved a resolution with such 28 principles that a potential Republican candidate must adhere to.
Why so strict you ask? Because the party “does not want to associate with candidates who do not act and speak in a manner that is consistent with the SC Republican Party Platform.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, assholes, but I really don’t think you’ll be needing to worry too much about associating with anyone you don’t want to associate with…. They wouldn’t want to sit next to you knobs on a bus, either.
You must favor, and live up to, abstinence before marriage.
You must be faithful to your spouse. Your spouse cannot be a person of the same gender, and you are not allowed to favor any government action that would allow for civil unions of people of the same sex.
You cannot now, from the moment you sign this pledge, look at pornography.
How will they regulate that last part, anyway?
The Clinton Chronicle reported that candidates will be interviewed by a three-person “Candidate Qualification Committee,” who will then in turn make a recommendation to the full executive party committee about whether or not to allow the candidate on the ballot.
Hysterical! It’s always the reichwingers claiming Socialism is inherently totalitarian!!!
It’s astonishing, of course, but more power to ‘em! If 99.999% of the potential Republican candidates are disqualified, this means the GOP will be running a slate of all church ladies in Laurens County. SC. Good luck with that, dipshits!
The deaths of celebrities have become predictably ghoulish spectacles, not only in the media (which is to be expected) but also in the misplaced “grief” and “deep love” that the public feels anew for the freshly deceased, as can be tallied up in the number of frantic Facebook wall and Twitter over-posting “tributes” that happen whenever someone famous dies. There’s a whole “firstism” tackiness to it all that makes me feel uncomfortable. And it’s so ritualized and dumbly Pavolian. I just don’t get it.
But something else I don’t get is how the occasion of Whitney Houston’s passing became such an excuse/empowerment for the worst racist trolling that I’ve seen in some time on the Fox News website, much that mentions President Obama, of course.
The Fox News website is always a hotbed of feverish racism and low IQ buffoonery, but usually they can’t be bothered to scrub their forums of it (there would be little else left) and so stuff like this tends to linger for a while. In this instance though, several hundred of the most egregious comments have already removed due to a public shaming by lefty websites. Comments that often had numerous “likes,” I should add.
Little Green Footballs cataloged some of them before they were deleted. Note how good the Fox New-watching trolls are at misspelling certain words so the filters won’t catch them (Actually they seem pretty good at misspelling almost anything, what am I saying?).
Hold your nose and take an “anthropological” look at what conservatives say to each other when they think no one else is paying attention [TO BE CLEAR: I removed spaces between the comments so this post wasn’t a mile long, but each paragraph here was from a different poster, this is not one long rant, as it might appear to be]:
A tragedy is when someones passes away from a terminal disease or something else that no one saw coming.Whitney is just an inferior lo w life ni gg er that needed to go,no tragedy,no loss.
Any death is a tragedy you heartless bástard.
not nignogs their death is a plus
SHe couldn’t even sell issues of “the national enquirer” anymore. Everyone was tired of the TNB. Niqqer flaps her lips and screeches, niqqer becomes rich. Niqqer ends up nearly broke after spending all of her money. Niqqer in constant fights and drug binges. Niqqer ODs when she learns she’s nearly broke and she is so wasted physically she can’t make another album. Niqqer hit the end of the road, niqqer thinking and niqqer behavior led her to where she had nothing. She couldn’t face life without the “bling bling”, she knew she would never have any more “kaching kaching”
[...]
I am now patiently waiting for the grand messiah Obama to have a blk fundraiser in honor of Whitley with Kevin Costner as guest of honor with all the Hollywood elites invited along with Alan Colmes, Al Sharpton, Jeremia Wright, Charles Rangel, etc. with a menu featuring blk eyed peas, grits, Imported Kobe steak, Dom Perignon, sweet potato pie and a mus lll im scarf as a momento of this great occasion.
Of course the door prize will be an all expense paid trip to Kenya to visit the Obama tribe and birthplace of his ancestors while the American people still look for this imposter’s birth certificate in Hawaii !!!
[...]
This is typical of the blk gene pool; it happens all the time. They cannot handle fame and fortune whether it’s derived from music, acting, sports or just plain entertainment. Too much fame and too much money at one time will ki ll ll you.
How many blk people have died from drugs including alcohol that have been in the sports and the entertainment industry or screwed up their married lives like Tiger Woods or worse, OJ Simpson !!!
This is the same disease that got Obama voted into the White House.
[...]
i don’t even consider them to be included in the human race let alone on a pedistal. the people that do are a bunch of loosers.
Story goes Obama sh0ved to much cr@ck up the wh0res @zz when he was going to sniiff it…
Obvious the use of to much hair strengthener did her in.That s__t will peel paint!
unfortunately like most nignog crack hoes she was able to apply her trade on “da streets”
Another nignog off the public social rolls
BIack females are the fattest segment of the population. BIack males are the most murderousss segment of the population. Africans have the lowest IQ of all people.
Like most of her species, she suffered from chronic stupidity.
tough break niqqer.
Nothing wrong with Coors, what is good about it most_n i g g e r s_ don’t like it
oh niqqa please,nigga please.
one of the only b l a c k chics i would have ever banged…..once you go c r ack er…..you dont do cr a c k
Woo Hoo One less obama voter
Whitney who?!? some /\/iggress music artist that had a couple of hits in the early 90’s. She’s since been forgotten and now she’s dead.. Who cares..
Africans love their drugs.
Jungle Buggie ??
This is a good lesson for all of you God loving Christian girls out there, stay away from “Jungle Love.”
One less bIack crack addict in the world today. Not such a big loss.
We Whiteys dont care about some monkey crackhead, change the headline!
How funny would it be if they fuckedup the tombstone. WHITEY HOUSTON
Their are B L A C K S and their are N i G G A S, which class do you put her mentor Bobby Brown into??? Whitney chose ???
Who cares? Black_trash gone is enough.
She is just like any other gh e tto queen.I hope the rest of these worthless piles in the inner cities follow her act .
What a waste of a good slit.
HER REAL NAME SHOULD BE KUNTA KINTI OR MOGUBA MAGABA, WHY AFRO-AMERICANS ARE USING ENGLISH NAMES AND LAST NAMES?….SHAME ON THEM!!
You know what you call Whitney Houston in a bathtub? A dead n i g g a h
Another buckwheat supporter bites the dust, oh well.
hatesandniqqers 3 hours ago
phuk you w hore,,,,,,,,,
Buckwheat is ne gro trash!
Bammy should not have given her crack from his personal stash!
B l a c k s have little to brag about about so they strut and crow about anything. The politically correct whites whine and cringe and try to be b l a c k themselves and identify with their “brothers”. Great singer but as stupid as her pal, the malignancy in the white house
she still be voting for the head niggg this nov
To bad it wasnt the monkey in the White House
If you’ve been thinking for some time that we’re living in an Idiocracy, these comments from the Fox News website will do nothing but strongly confirm that notion…
Get a whiff of the action at yesterday’s CPAC event in Washington, DC where Brad Stine, truly one of the worst comics I’ve ever had the misfortune to listen to, speaks openly about “natural selection” to a bunch of wild and crazy Republicans. I do hope that some of them take his advice about not wearing seat-belts, I must say. It’s the patriotic duty of every conservative to protest having to wear seat-belts and use baby seats! Don’t do what that Obama tells you to do! Boycott motorcycle helmets, too, conservatives!
Stine, who looks like Gérard Depardieu’s less pretty younger brother, isn’t even a shitty version of Denis Leary and, of course, Denis Leary totally sucks. Even this audience seems rather chilly to Stine’s “talents.” If you are a glutton for punishment, you can watch his entire set here. You won’t laugh with Stine, but you will laugh at him..
If you think this is bad—and trust me, you will—then you have to see the Conservative dating advice seminar that took place at CPAC. Look at those guys! What misfortune in their lives made them such monumental plonkers? They all look like they were birthed in the same lab, then issued blue blazers, grey slacks and Bass Weejuns along with a lifetime subscription to the National Review and raised in Plato’s Cave with a TV that only got Fox News!
“If what you got is common sense, hell, I don’t want none!”
If you enjoy radio shows where supposedly straight men discuss buttsecks, then “Peter LaBarbera’s Americans For Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour” program is the show for you! On a recent installment, LaBarbera welcomed fellow anti-gay activist, North Carolina Pastor Patrick Wooden.
“[...] responded to critics over his comments that he has an “anal obsession.” Wooden has claimed that gay men have to “wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” when they are older as a result of shoving cellphones, baseball bats and animals in their anus. Wooden told LaBarbera that anal obsession is “the very basis of homosexuality” and he simply wants to tell gay men to “get it together, let the Lord deliver you and let God give you a woman, a wife, where you can enjoy the pleasures of a wife” and stop “participating in these perversive, sexual acts”
From the interview:
Wooden: Now it is amazing that you and I are called men who have the obsession with the anus, right? Anal obsession, is that what she said? Is that not the very basis of homosexuality? We’re not homosexuals. What we’re saying is, we’re saying to men, ‘hey, let’s get it together, let the Lord deliver you and let God give you a woman, a wife, where you can enjoy the pleasures of a wife.’ Now you’re talking about a case of the pot calling the kettle black, we have no anal-obsession, but we are armed with the truth about the damage that people are doing to their rectums and anuses as a result of participating in these perversive, sexual acts.
After going off on a tangent about Tyler Perry, Flip WIlson and Ru Paul, Wooden is asked about Oprah Winfrey:
LaBarbera: Now let’s go to a black liberal, Oprah, I wanted to get you to comment. I saw one of her final episodes before she went off the air, now she’s on her own network, she ended it and she had this appeal on homosexuality. When I looked in her eyes, I saw somebody who had become a hardened supporter of so-called same-sex so-called marriage, she has evolved, she has rejected her Christian upbringing, whatever Christian upbringing she had Patrick, she was a hardcore supporter of homosexuality and I wonder how that happened. Do you think that’s just a factor of swimming in that Hollywood environment?
Wooden: I think it is; I think it is a factor of swimming. I think and this is just my opinion I’ve never talked to Oprah in my life, I think it is part of the price that she had to pay in order to build her empire. I would say to her if I had the chance, hey Oprah what has a man or a woman profited if they gain the world and lose their souls, if they gain the world and lose themselves?
As the Firesign Theatree once said, “A stiff idiot is the worst kind!” I’d imagine that if Pastor Wooden actually had a chance to voice his anal obsessions to Oprah, she’d probably just react the way most normal people would, by telling him to go fuck himself. and mind his own business.
Mind-blowingly stupid Oklahoma state State Senator Ralph Shortey—who in the past has introduced bills authorizing law enforcement to crack down on illegal immigrants by seizing their homes and vehicles—has filed a, um, “controversial” bill to ban the manufacture or sale of food products which contain aborted human fetuses.
State Senator Ralph Shortey says he’s done research and found reports that companies have used stem cells in the research and development of food.
“I don’t know if it is happening in Oklahoma, it may be, it may not be. What I am saying is that if it does happen then we are not going to allow it to manufacture here,” says Shortey. The lawmaker that represents Oklahoma County couldn’t give any specific examples.
“There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors,” says Shortey.
What, and deny the good people of the state of Oklahoma more authentic tasting Bac-O-Bits?
Also in 2012, Shortey introduced a bill seeking a public vote on amending the Oklahoma Constitution to abolish the Court of Criminal Appeals. In the past he’s introduced measures to deny citizenship to babies born to illegals and an amendment to a bill that would have allowed legislators to carry firearms anywhere, including government buildings. If you’ve seen any video footage of this guy, he’s as dumb as fucking rock.
You do know how this moron got into office, don’t you? It’s simple: He ran and more people voted for him than his opponent.
The campaign manager of Arkansas Democratic congressional candidate Ken Aden arrived home last night to find his child’s pet cat murdered on the front porch with the word “LIBERAL” scrawled across its lifeless body.
Aden’s campaign manager, Jake Burris, lives in central Arkansas with his four kids. Blue Arkansas has more on the scene at Burris’s home (emphases are ours):
Last night, Jake and his four kids had come back to their Russellville home. As they were getting out of the car, one of his children discovered their family cat dead on the front porch. One side of the animal’s head had been bashed in and an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. But there was something even more horrifying to be found on the corpse. Written across the animal’s fur in black marker was the word “LIBERAL“.
Pope County, where Burris lives, is a highly-conservative area of Arkansas. Aden has been running for the 3rd congressional district seat, currently held by Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), since August 2011. He released a statement on the matter this morning: “To kill a child’s pet is just unconscionable. As a former combat soldier, I’ve seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity.”
Heinous. What a demented thing to do to someone you disagree with and a poor defenseless creature. This is low.
A speaker at the first—and hopefully last—South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention told an audience mostly comprised of complete idiots that the U.S. could save $260 billion building the border fence by forcing illegal aliens to work as slave labor instead of hiring union workers. Colin Heaton discussed his understanding that it would cost $400 billion to build a border fence using labor unions, but reckons his plan would cost just $140 billion.
“I proposed a two dual-fence system, multi-tiered wall with a no man’s land — I put a minefield in there, but they said no — intrusion detection systems like we use in detecting tunnels with nitrous and oxygen emission control emitters to detect carbon dioxide upon exhalation of someone digging a tunnel,” he explained. “Then you pump gas in there, — tear gas, nothing lethal. Just make it come out the other side.”
“But what you do, you take all these incarcerated illegal aliens — even give some of the guys who are U.S. citizens in the U.S. prison system, who make about 27 cents a day doing ridiculous work — kick out the union labor charging $28 an hour, force these Mexicans and these other people to make $5 a day, making more money than they made in Mexico anyway,” Heaton continued. “Put them to work building a security fence under military and local-state law enforcement administration. … Projected budget: $140 billion, which will pay for itself in four years once you get them the hell out of here.”
Heaton went on to propose a large, single federal detention system to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, “sort of like a KOA Campground with walls.”
The tea party speaker also drew a comparison between Adolph Hitler and President Barack Obama, but admitted that the current White House resident would not have caused the Holocaust.
“The only difference between Adolph Hitler and Barack Obama is that Barack Obama not overtly ethnically challenged with regards to various groups and religious paradigms,” he said. “But socialism is alive and well in Washington.”
So says a fucking asshole moments after suggesting that the United States of America open forced-labor camps on the Mexican border!!!
On Martin Luther King Day, yet!!!
How the fuck would rounding up Mexican illegals and sticking them in labor camps be all that different from what the Germans did to the Jews? And somehow Colin Heaton got the idea that Obama is just like Hitler, huh? Stunning, isn’t it???
This guy is the best Teabagger ever!
After making these remarks, Colin Heaton was politely applauded by a bunch of ignorant old coots who did not realize that advocating something like this would mean that they were in support of illegal aliens being forced by the US government to take away American jobs!
(To Mr. Heaton, if you’re reading this, did I mischaracterize your thoughts here or not? If so, please explain how I got it wrong in the comments).
What makes this episode even more unfortunate is that several of South Carolina’s elected Republican officials were in attendance at the Tea party convention. In addition to Governor Nikki Haley, other speakers at the Tea party convention include Sen. Jim DeMint, U.S. Reps. Jeff Duncan, Mick Mulvaney and Tim Scott, state Treasurer Curtis Loftis and Attorney General Alan Wilson. Presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul were also scheduled to speak to the group.
Logic and intelligent people stuff never was of much use to these Tea baggers to begin with, but as the movement’s wave recedes, leaving only trash on the beach like these poor fools in Myrtle Beach, does the Republican party really wonder why Hispanic voters want nothing to do with them?
In this case, England. In the editorial pages of today’s Telegraph, Assistant Comment Editor Tom Chivers made this, as far as I am concerned, completely accurate assessment of the brain dead freak show that the modern Republican party has become. He writes in Republicans turn their back on the Enlightenment:
The Grand Ol’ Party (GOP), as the Republicans are known, has an uncomfortable relationship with scientific fact. Rick Santorum, a frontrunner in the nomination race, has said of a fellow candidate: “If he wants to believe he is the descendant of a monkey then he has the right to believe that, but I disagree with him on this liberal belief.” Yes: acknowledging biology’s central premise is “liberal”. His opponents Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachman and Newt Gingrich have all made noises doubting either climate change, evolution or both; only Jon Huntsman, a forlorn no-hoper, acknowledges the reality of both.
It’s not just the candidates. Fifty-two per cent of Republican voters reject the theory of evolution, saying mankind was created in present form within the last 10,000 years; just 31 per cent think man-made climate change is happening. In Congress, Republicans fought stem cell research and the HPV vaccine. Sarah Palin, ignoramus-in-chief, mocked “fruit-fly research” as a “pet project [with] little or nothing to do with the public good,” rejecting at a stroke most advances in genetics since Gregor Mendel.
Boom! Cracking good line, that…
This Nixonian strategy actually changed conservative psychology, according to [Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America]. “It’s been argued convincingly that when you energise people around these sort of [hot button issues like gay marriage, abortion, the war on Christmas] you get an authoritarian streak coming out, characterised by rigidity and inflexibility, thinking that you’re absolutely right and the other side is absolutely wrong; a need for certainty, a need for order.” This black-and-white thinking does not sit well with science’s error bars and uncertainties.
Worse, it’s become a vicious circle. The Republican party is trapped by its own anti-science tactics. Part of the culture war strategy included attacking intellectuals: describing them as weak and spineless and effete. Academics, always liberal-inclined, responded by becoming more so: “They’re so overwhelmingly liberal now it’s kind of ridiculous, and so is the scientific community. The Democratic party is drawing the votes of people with advanced degrees, and the Republican party is not,” says Mooney. So, in turn, the Republican party reacted by becoming ever more distrustful of intellectualism, and pushing wave after wave of scientists and academics from the Right to the Left. “The more the Republican party rejects nuance and attacks knowledge, the more the people who have knowledge go the other way. It shows in statistics about liberalism among professors and scientists, and distribution of PhDs across the parties: there’s a giant knowledge and expertise gap.”
And to appeal to this anti-intellectual base, the Republican elite now have to pretend to be stupider than they are. Gingrich, who in earlier years repeatedly acknowledged the dangers of climate change, suddenly dropped a chapter written by a climate scientist from an upcoming book after getting challenged on air by Rush Limbaugh, the hugely influential Right-wing talk radio host; Mitt Romney moved from “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that” to “We don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet” in the space of three months.
So expertly observed. So true!
Do they mean it, or is it pandering to their anti-intellectual base? “Santorum, Bachmann and Perry are completely out of touch with reality. With Romney and Gingrich, many people get the impression that they know what’s right and what’s wrong, but can’t say it,” says Mooney.
Perhaps. But nowadays, to get far in the Republican party, you can’t be part of what George Bush might call the reality-based community. It’s a worrying state of affairs: America is becoming an intellectual two-speed nation, with a technocratic, informed elite and a scientifically illiterate rump who are falling behind economically in their increasingly knowledge-based economy. The GOP is increasingly the party of the uneducated: it’s bad enough for them, but if it means voting stupid people, or people who are pretending to be stupid, into the most powerful office in the world, it’s bad for the rest of us too.
Plus one! I mean come on, how is this not 100% accurate? Barney Frank was right with his suggestion for the Democrats: “We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.”
Republicans turn their back on the Enlightenment (The Telegraph)
Lost in all the reporting of Newt Gingrich’s humiliating implosion in the polls leading up to the Iowa Caucus, is the fact that Public Policy Polling asked nearly 600 Iowa Republican voters if they thought that President Barack Obama was born in the United States and found that over half of them are “birthers” or “not sure” about his country of birth.
Only 47% of the GOP voters polled in Iowa said that Obama was born in the United States.
For god’s sake… half?? Still? People this “reality challenged” and ignorant shouldn’t have such an out-sized influence on who gets to be leader of the free world. An electorate as uninformed and as unintelligent as this is a danger to all of us.
That’s why we should cut funding for education…it’s KENYAN SOCIALISM!
“A lesbian married couple and their two daughters powerfully address Troy, MI Mayor, Janice Daniels, at a city council meeting about her derogatory Facebook posting about “queers” marrying in NY.”
They get a well-deserved standing ovation at the end, too.
This Janice Daniels is an embarrassment to her town, the Tea party and to herself. She needs to resign and crawl back under the rock that she came from…
This clip is destined to become a classic. It’s a blueprint for WIN!
As reported by Mary Clarkin in The Hutchinson News, a Kansas Tea party group calling itself the Patriot Freedom Alliance, posted a picture of a skunk on its website saying that the skunk should replace the eagle as the country’s symbol.
“It is half black, half white, and almost everything it does, stinks,” the website captioned the picture.
“It’s satire is what it is,” said Thomas Hymer, who maintains the group’s website, told Clarkin. “Satire in a politically incorrect form.”
Or, you know, a racist form…
Another Tea party supporter, an apparently not very bright fellow named Chuck Sankey, agreed with Thomas Hymer that it’s satire to call a person of mixed racial heritage a… skunk.
“It just makes a point that we’re in trouble and what’s happening doesn’t smell right,” Sankey said. “That’s what it means to me.”
That’s because you’re a fucking idiot, Chuck!
Sankey told The Hutchison News, “Isn’t that the truth? What’s wrong with the truth?”
Obama’s mother was a white American, and his father was a black African.
“It may be offensive to some, of course, but in humor there is always an element of truth,” said Sankey, saying he is neither racist nor bigoted but is concerned about the direction the country is going.
If people are offended by it, Sankey said, his advice is: “Don’t look at it.”
Sankey also said Sarah Palin has been the target of worse insults.
Uh, maybe so, Chuckles, but how many racist insults do you reckon were leveled at Sarah Palin? Wanna hazard a guess?
And Tea partiers wonder why everyone thinks they’re a bunch of dumb racists?
There’s been a lot of hand-wringing lately from so-called moderate Republicans over the brainless crew of chuckleheaded “leadership” running their party headlong over a steep cliff.
Even David Frum (David Frum???) has taken to expressing his exasperation with his party in a recent New York magazine article titled “When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality?”:
The Bush years cannot be repudiated, but the memory of them can be discarded to make way for a new and more radical ideology, assembled from bits of the old GOP platform that were once sublimated by the party elites but now roam the land freely: ultralibertarianism, crank monetary theories, populist fury, and paranoid visions of a Democratic Party controlled by ACORN and the New Black Panthers. For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
In an NPR interview, Frum discusses how people who listen to talk radio or watch Fox News have a completely different set of facts than the rest of us. He’s correct there, of course… and he’s David freakin’ Frum!
I’m perplexed, but grateful for small miracles that at least there is one conservative pundit out there who can translate their brain-damaged behavior (to a certain extent) for the rest of us. And will you look at that: They seem fucking crazy to him, too!
And then there’s today’s column, also at New York, from Jonathan Chait titled “The Agony of the Moderate Republican,” where he observes that former Bush speech writer, Michael Gerson, “[w]hen confronted with a relatively straightforward description of the party’s agenda, he instinctively recoils — not at the agenda, but at the description itself.
“As president, Obama has asserted that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and children with Down syndrome to “fend for themselves,” and that the GOP plan is “dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.” In what context would these claims be true?”
Here’s how Chait parses the question posed by Gerson and turns it right around on him.
In what context? Well, let’s see. The House Republican budget would cut Medicaid — a bare-bones health insurance program for the poor, disabled, and elderly — by $750 billion over ten years, ramping up the scale of cuts until funding has been reduced by 35 percent by 2022. When you’re slashing the funding of a program that’s far cheaper than private insurance and not replacing it with anything, you’re pretty much leaving people to fend for themselves.
As for children with Down syndrome, they’re an important part of the Medicaid program. (People with disabilities account for 42 percent of the cost of Medicaid.) Unsurprisingly, disability advocates were apoplectic about the Republican budget.
And the House Republican budget would repeal the Affordable Care Act and put in place nothing whatsoever to cover the uninsured, thereby increasing their ranks by some 32 million.
Now, Republicans can certainly contest Obama’s description. I’m sure they have arguments as to why weakening laws that have produced cleaner air and water will not actually make the air and water less clean, and why cutting or eliminating programs that provide medical care to people who can’t afford it won’t deny them medical care. But Gerson doesn’t merely consider Obama’s description to be contestable. He considers it a lie so obvious it requires no rebuttal. [Emphasis added]
That’s interesting, isn’t it? Like there’s this weird blind spot that conservatives have about their own biases that makes it awfully difficult to even talk sensibly with them anymore. I doubt Jon Huntsman would have much of a quarrel with that statement in private, what do you think?
How a party can so nakedly represent only the top 1 percent while at the same time trying to stop anything that will help the economy, and survive while doing it, is beyond me.
More from Tomasky:
Every blessed once in a great while, all artifice is stripped away, rhetoric collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, and we get to see things as they really are. Such will be the case later this week when the Senate tries to vote on extending the payroll-tax holiday. The Republicans will oppose it—that is to say, the Republicans will support a tax increase on working Americans. And why? Because the Democrats want to pay for it with a small surtax on the very top earners. So the choice couldn’t be more direct: which is more important, giving the middle class a tax cut or protecting those who make more than $1 million a year? Republicans are making it clear. This vote alone should destroy them.
The facts: The Social Security payroll tax comes to 12.4 percent of an employee’s salary—employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent. The money goes into the Social Security Trust Fund and finances benefits. At the end of last year, the Obama administration, in exchange for temporarily extending the Bush tax rates on all income levels, got Congress to agree to a one-year 2 percent payroll-tax holiday for employees, down to 4.2 percent. For a $50,000 earner, that meant paying $1,000 a year less in payroll taxes. It was agreed in that law that the holiday would cost the Social Security Trust Fund nothing—the depleted revenue would be replaced out of the general treasury. So the holiday adds to the general deficit but does not affect the trust fund.
The cut proved popular, or is presumed to be popular, so now, as many people predicted last year, Congress wants to extend it. Republicans of course say (as they say of everything) that it hasn’t done any good. But economists attest to its stimulative value. Two economists at the Economic Policy Institute say ending the holiday would reduce GDP by $128 billion and cost 972,000 jobs in 2012. The EPI is a liberal outfit, but Mark Zandi of Moody’s, who advised John McCain in 2008, agrees that raising the payroll tax back to where it was could cause another recession.
And besides those macroeconomic concerns, there is the simple question of money in people’s pockets as they try to tough out the economy. A thousand dollars to a $50,000 earner, or $1,500 to a $75,000 earner, isn’t nothing.
What the Senate Democrats want to do now is this. They want to increase the employee’s reduction from 2 percent to 3.1 percent (that is, to cut it in half from the normal 6.2 percent rate). And they now want, for the first time, to extend the holiday to employers as well. This is important, and it probably won’t be well explained in very many places. But the Democrats would have employers pay 3.1 percent (rather than the 6.2 percent they now pay) on the first $5 million of their payroll. Also, if employers add to their payrolls, they would pay no payroll tax on new hires. So the new bill is specifically aimed at helping the job creators. The total cost is $255 billion.
The Democrats want to pay for it with a 3.5 percent surtax on dollars earned over $1 million per year. In other words, if someone earns $1.3 million a year, she will pay the extra 3.5 percent only on the last $300,000 in earnings; that is, an extra $10,500 a year (bear in mind that this person takes home, after taxes, around $30,000 every two weeks). So it certainly raises the taxes of the very wealthiest. But it gives more money back to middle-class people, and it stimulates the economy, perhaps to the tune of 50,000 jobs a month, maybe even more.
How, I ask you HOW, HOW do these feckless “Marie Antoinette Republicans” think they can vote against this and still hold EVEN THE DUMBEST members of their base? How many Senate Republicans will vote for this? One? Two? None? It’s incredible to contemplate what this will do to them. I’ve always hoped to see the suicidal self-immolation of the Republican Party, but I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see it in my lifetime. At the rate these buffoons are heading for the cliff, it could happen before Christmas!
Tomasky concludes:
Obama should give an Oval Office speech Wednesday night and say: “If you are an employee and make less than $1 million, or if you are an employer of any size, I am trying to give you a tax cut. If you are an employee who makes more than $1 million a year, you should write and thank your Republican senator, because the Republicans are blocking me and helping you.”
I realize that this post is one of those, “Hey smell this, it smells like shit” kind of things, but really, it’s worth it to sample the idiotic wares of Victoria Jackson’s new alternate reality conservative version of The View, if only for a minute.
I know, just what you were waiting for. You and the rest of the world:
The PolitiChicks are here! Finally, Conservative Americans will have an alternative to those other liberal-based talk shows in which women scream over each other and call Conservatives vile names.
The PolitiChicks are former Saturday Night Live alumni and Tea Party favorite Victoria Jackson, pro-life speaker and activist Jennique Stewart, editor and activist Jennie Jones and Ann-Marie Murrell, columnist and host of The Patriot Update video show.
Some of the topics covered in their first episodes will be illegal immigration, gay marriage, abortion and the Occupy movement. Each of the women have their own strong points of view on each of the subjects and aren’t afraid to speak up—or sing up, as Victoria Jackson tends to do throughout the episodes. In the first episode of PolitiChicks, the ladies discuss gay marriage, Islam and the intolerance of the left toward anyone who disagrees with them.
How bright can the other hosts of this shit sandwich be (or desperate for money, I suppose) to debase themselves professionally by sharing a forum with one of the single dumbest people in America today? If you lie down with dogs you get fleas, right, so what happens to your career when you hitch your horse to Victoria Jackson? Each of her fellow co-hosts MUST have had such thoughts cross their minds after being offered the gig. And they took it anyway! (Watch the look on their faces as she sings. What could they be thinking?)
It’s telling that many of the ads running on their YouTube channel are for payday advance places. A lot of Tea party types must be living paycheck to paycheck these days… (And the other ads are for bail bondsmen!)
A grand total of THREE, yes, three assholes stage their own completely witless counter-protest today in lower Manhattan.
“Get a job”?
Seriously? THAT is the best you can do? The very BEST and smartest and most clever thing you can think of? In a SEA of clever, funny signs you come up with lameness and you’re the ones who still have a job???
Apparently so. When you’re an apologist for a failed economic system… yes, THIS is the best you can do.
There are no jobs, lickspittle dummies! That’s one of the reasons these people are keeping you from getting to work today, Republican fools! Occupy everywhere!
