"Meaningless," we will be told. "Liberal witch-hunting." Or, if that doesn't work, "They all do it." (Yes, that makes no sense, but we ran right past making sense many months ago). Also, Unions.

This little tidbit will be quickly dismissed or ignored as our Liberal Media Elite devotes its limited attention span to the "sexier" story which offers evidence that Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice for life, is probably only the second craziest person in his household, behind his wife, the Tea Party activist. Then again, since the Silent Justice is one of the people who decided that corporations were "people" and the massive influx of identified money into our elections is just fine and dandy, I think he has her beat no matter how many weird phone calls she makes.

"Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than The Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with The Republican Party's own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!"

My goodness, who ever in the world is saying such blasphemy?

That awful Nancy Pelosi? That swearing and cursing Rahm Emmanuel? Perhaps the obviously rich and evil George Soros?

Well, no. None of those folks.

This guy.

"If he survives, all our hearts will sink and the world will go dark."

While he calls "Tea Party candidates like Carl Paladino and Christine O'Donnell—`people we wouldn't ask home to dinner, except in a Dinner for Schmucks sense' " and says he'd love to see them lose, writer Tunku Varadrajan urges his fellow Libertarians in Utah to definitely vote for the equally nutty  Sharon Angle.

Here's his reasoning.

It is exactly this simple.

Wherein I defend my position.

I was challenged, sorta, by a friend of mine over on the Liquid Diet blog last week for a passing reference in a joking post about a local beer drinking group in which I used a Tea Party as an example, suggesting that I have kept shifting my position on who is behind that particular scam.

He was wrong.

Frank Rich in this morning's New York Times:

[L]ocal chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker.

I have said all those things and more in this space in the past. Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks organization were instrumental in forming the Tea Party into a political entity rather than a ragtag bunch of protesters. The Tea Party is essentially a FOX News TV show because the network (which has, amazingly, four potential GOP presidential candidates on its payroll) does everything it can to prop up their events. The Koch brothers are the money behind much the Tea Parties and much of the right wing movement.

None of those three positions are contradictory nor preclude the accuracy of any of the others. Nor are they wild and crazy fantasies propagated by the left.

Here's an analysis of the economic involvements of the Koch Brothers (and George Soros, who was also mention in my Liquid Diet post) in contemporary politics.

Here's is the much talked-about Jane Mayer expose in the New Yorker.

This is a "free market" site on Armey's involvement in the Tea Party movement.

And, finally, from Politico last week:

News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, contributed $1 million this summer to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business lobby that has been running an aggressive campaign in support of the Republican effort to retake Congress. It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.

Here deponent doth rest his case.

A familiar figure has something to say about the new GOP "Pledge to America."

NOTE: This idea was stolen from John Cole at Balloon Juice because it is so freakin' perfect. Plus, let's face it, I have very little shame.

How Newt Gingrich might never have happened.

Charles Pierce, at Altercation:

In 1994, I had to fly to Mississippi the day after the Republicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since God was a boy.  Jeebus, were people there happy. There was barely enough bourbon at Hal and Mal's to make life marginally tolerable. This upheaval was led by Newt Gingrich, a former backbench bomb-tosser who, only four years earlier, in an election almost nobody watched and even fewer people remember, came within 978 votes of losing his seat to a Democrat named David Worley who got submarined by his national party, a decision that should have some people still hanging by their thumbs in Washington. Two years later, he almost lost a giftwrapped primary to someone named Herman Clark. On that day in 1994, when everybody—and I mean everybody, read some of the tripe that was written back then, I mean, seriously, there were folks at Time who were picking out silver patterns—was calling Newt a visionary intellectual leader for the new century or some such rot, I was wondering how the new Churchill could be someone who was life-and-death with David Worley and Herman Clark back home in consecutive elections. And that was before we all knew about his mad wife-dumping skillz.
  
Well, it seems that the momentum of conservative bullshit has caught up with Newt, and maybe gone past him. The Right has constructed an entire self-contained political BioSphere. It has its own science; every single GOP senatorial candidate in New Mexico, New Hampshire, and New York is a climate-change denier. It also has its own history. This is what's driving the intellectual side of the coming election. This history has its Ur-texts; Charles Murray's The Bell Curve is one of them. But things have really been heating up over the past decade, as rightwing designer history from rightwing design shops found its mass audience. The weird signs accusing the president of being a fascist and a socialist simultaneously can't be understood without reading Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg's hawk-a-loogie doorstop from a few years back. Along with gold swindlers and glycerined tears, Glenn Beck's bunco schemes include the construction of his own personal animatronic Founding Fathers, all of whom speak in the voices Glenn hears in his head. 
 
This is not really about creating a counterhistory, though. This is about creating a simulacrum of history, just as Gingrich is a simulacrum of a historian. It's about creating a salable narrative that can put a faint intellectual gloss on what you are prone to believe anyway. Narratives are more malleable than actual history is, and more easily dispensed once you achieve the political power for which you created the narrative—and, ultimately, this self-contained political universe—in the first place. So, when Newt recently summoned up his professor's voice and accused Barack Obama of acting out of "a Kenyan anti-colonial worldview" that the president imbibed from his late father, he borrowed the trope from a piece in Forbes by the noted charlatan and Mark Warren-fearing coward Dinesh D'Souza, which is rather like getting your drinking water from one of those pig lagoons in North Carolina, but never mind.The important thing to watch was how a rather, ahem, unique view of history went so smoothly from a reputed conservative thinker to an allegedly intellectual Republican politician and thence to a public so credulous that it may be well on its way to electing an entire Congress full of walking, talking produce.
 
Twenty years ago, 978 votes would have meant the end of Newt Gingrich's political career. People should remember that. P.S—And, to my friend, Greg, a limited rebuttal, aimed specifically at his final paragraph, and this conclusion: "We have to put processes in place to prevent it happening again in the future, to be sure, and be vigilant about that." There has been no indication that the current administration is prepared to do either the former, or the latter, and especially not the former. In fact, it recently won a famous victory in federal court in which it argued that it has been right to do precisely the opposite. Which, alas, disgusts me.

A great debate?

For them as has access to Teh Facebook, there's a fine political discussion brouhaha going on at this link among me (the original poster), and fellow beer/drinks-writing colleagues Alan Moen and Kerry Byrne.

the GOP base (which is pretty base).

See the original here.

"Where is this confusion coming from?" you're kidding, right? You have to be kidding.

More nonsense from Swampland about the "Obama is a Muslim" foolishness,  this time voiced by an actual member of the Liberal Media Elite:

Where is this confusion coming from? I asked [Alan Cooperman of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life], who suggested this explanation: "Part of what's going on here may be that there's been a relative--especially compared to the previous president--absence of information from the president himself and from the White House about his personal religion and his practice of his personal faith. In the relative vacuum of information, suggestions from the president's critics have been able to gain more currency and uncertainty is rising." I think that's about right. Given how frequently and personally Obama spoke about his Christian faith during the Democratic primaries and the 2008 general election, his relative silence since moving into the White House has been puzzling.

You know, I am old enough to remember when the very fact that John F. Kennedy had a religious affiliation was almost enough to disqualify him for running for the White House. Now it seems any candidate who does not display his religious affiliation on his sleeve and talk about it endless is...well, suspect.

Aside for the terrible, terrible thing that says about where this country is (I almost typed "is going," but that ship has sailed), let's at least be honest.

More than anything else, the issue here is that the current president of the United States is black.

Has been from the beginning and is now, and until the rest of us, the majority of us really, step up and face down the assholes, that is what it will remain.

And all of us will reap the whirlwind.

Lies and more lies, accompanied by "blithe acceptance." This is what we have become.

From a British commenter in this thread at Swampland, remarking on the fact that 18% of Americans apparently believe an absurdity...

[H]alf the country don't know that Obama is not a Muslim. Yes, that's shocking. But even more shocking - to me as a Brit - is the blithe acceptance of the amount of people who positively think he is a Muslim. 

This seems to be the conventional wisdom amongst commentators, right or left, that "30% or thereabouts can be counted on to believe any old perverse right-wing fantasy." That's just under 100 million people in allegedly the most sophisticated, prosperous and free country in the world. It is shocking to me that that is simply accepted. 

Overall, this just demonstrates that - by and large - the public is uneducated, ill-informed and lazy; and that they don't want to change. 

Honestly, you guys don't deserve Obama.

A follow-up commenter points out that the "Liberal Media Elite," among others, validates such nonsense because it's good for selling newspapers and, even more importantly, they dare not take a stand in favor of reality lest it affront their readers and/or damage their journalist purity by suggesting one side of the argument is full of shit.

He Said/She Said rules over all.

Somewhere Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and their compatriots weep.

I am old enough, bitter enough, and convinced at last that my children and grandchildren are smart enough to get out while the getting is good enough, to almost welcome the absolute horror show that appears to be scheduled to write the final chapter of U.S. history.

Except that I fear that the jackass element which is poised to take over the wreckage will blow the whole f___ing planet to hell.

Seriously, if for no other reason, I want America to survive so that history can damn the whole batch of you to hell.

When "broke" isn't broke...or broken (the big Social Security lie).

This long excerpt from yesterday's edition of Bob Somerby's always interesting, sometimes infuriating Daily Howler dismisses the Big Lie simply and effectively and deserves wider attention, and so I've posted it here. I also wanted to have a copy accessible to forward or print out and hand to anybody who throws this old canard at me going forward...

Special report: The thirty-year itch! PART 2—ALAN SIMPSON’S CON (permalink): Will Social Security “still be there” when Mike Hatchell, age 52, retires? Plainly yes, barring national melt-down. (Unless enough people start thinking it won’t be, in which case radical “reform” to the program becomes much easier to sell.)

On last Thursday evening’s Countdown, Hatchell said he had to spend his existing retirement funds during 59 weeks of unemployment. (His wife has also been out of work. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/16/10.) He volunteered an intriguing thought when asked about his retirement prospects:

HATCHELL (8/12/10): Obviously, I mean, with the unemployment—after 59 weeks without a job, you know, I mean, the IRA accounts, you know, that got drained. We basically have no retirement other than, hopefully, the government will have Social Security. We all know how vague that might be in the future.

Hatchell seemed like a very bright person. As we watched him, we kept thinking that he would make an excellent national spokesman for a range of political/issue groups. But, like millions of other people, he has heard all kinds of stories about what a fraud Social Security is. As early as 1994, a large number of younger voters had been conned into believing that they would never get Social Security benefits (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/16/10). Like millions of other Americans, Hatchell seems to retain this fear.

People have heard a welter of claims about Social Security, as we noted in yesterday’s post. But for the most part, people who fear the demise of the program have been misled by two basic cons.

Ironically, the two major cons are semi-contradictory. The first con says that the program’s trust fund doesn’t exist. The second con explains what will happen after the trust fund is gone:

First con—the trust fund: On the one hand, people have heard that the Social Security trust fund is just “an accounting fiction”—“a pile of worthless IOUs,” “the left hand borrowing from the right hand.” (The money isn’t there—we’ve already spent it!) Since Social Security is supposed to start drawing on the trust fund in the next few years—since the trust fund is supposed to allow the system to maintain promised benefits through the year 2037—this suggests that Social Security might be on the verge of a near-term collapse.

Second con—after the trust fund is gone: On the other hand, people have heard that Social Security will “go broke” or “go bankrupt” once the trust fund expires in 2037 (according to current projections). For most people, these terms suggest some sort of cataclysmic collapse, after which the Social Security system would have to be shuttered. Presumably, this explains why so many people, for so many years, have seemed to assume that they will never draw any benefits.

Those are the two basic cons. People like Hatchell have heard these cons for at least the past thirty years.

It’s easy to address the second con—to explain what happens after 2037. Alan Simpson is the Republican co-chairman of Obama’s deficit commission. Back in June, he said Social Security “will go broke in the year 2037” in an interview with Alex Lawson. But as soon as Lawson challenged that language, Simpson described the actual facts—the facts these scare merchants have known all along. John Berry did the reporting, for the Fiscal Times:

BERRY (6/20/10): Lawson asked if the [deficit] commission was working on Social Security, and Simpson replied, "We’re really working on solvency… the key is solvency."

"What about adequacy? Are you focusing on adequacy as well?" asked Lawson.

Replied Simpson: "Sure. We have to take care of the lesser in society. I don't know where you get all the crap you come up with. ... We’re trying to take care of the lesser people in society, like we always have in this country, and do that in a way without getting into all the flash words that you love to dig up, like cutting Social Security, which is bullshit. We’re not cutting anything. We're not cutting anything, we’re trying to make it solvent. It will go broke in the year 2037."

[…]

Lawson continued the interview by asking, "What do you mean by ‘broke’? Do you mean the surplus [the trust fund] will go out and then it will only be able to pay 75 percent of its benefits?"

"Just listen, will you listen to me instead of babbling?" Simpson said. "In the year 2037, instead of getting 100 percent of your check, you are going to get about 75 percent of your check. That’s if we touch nothing. So if you'd like that, fine.”

Duh. After making the frightening claim that Social Security “will go broke in the year 2037,” Simpson explained what would actually happen. Since payroll taxes would keep rolling in, the system would never “go bankrupt” or “broke,” unless you’re reinventing the language. Instead, payroll taxes would keep rolling in, and benefits would keep going out, although the system would be able to pay only 75 percent of scheduled benefits. Those scheduled benefits are higher than the benefits which are currently being paid (even when adjusted for inflation), but this would not be a desirable circumstance. That said, Mike Hatchell would still be receiving benefits, even after the trust fund expires—though his benefits would have to be cut at that point, barring some new source of revenue.

This would not be a desirable outcome—but Social Security would still “be there.” It would not go belly-up. If we’re still speaking traditional English, it wouldn’t be bankrupt or broke.

When people like Simpson use words like “bankrupt” and “broke,” they deceive people like Hatchell. Unfortunately, they’ve been at this game for a very long time, over at least three decades. As a result, many people are very confused about the program’s long-term prospects. They’ve heard that the system is “going broke.” They think they will never get benefits.

That’s the bad news, but here’s the good news again: This long-term situation is extremely easy to explain. You can see how easily Simpson explained it—but only after he was challenged about his claim that the system “will go broke.” Can we talk? Barring some sort of national meltdown, Social Security will never go broke in the way Hatchell seems to fear. Barring some sort of national meltdown, Social Security will always be there—though we may need to find new revenue, if we want to keep future benefits at their promised levels.

The long-term situation is easy to explain. This raises an obvious question: Why has no one ever explained it to Hatchell? Quite plainly, Hatchell is a very bright person; watching him, we kept thinking how good a spokesman he would be for various groups. But he seems to think that Social Security may not be there when he retires. (“We all know” such things, he said.) Thirty years of “liberal” ineptitude, indifference and fecklessness explain this situation.

The long-term situation is easy to explain; you can see how easily Simpson explained it. But so what? Over the course of the past thirty years, your “liberal” “intellectual leaders” have been too stupid and lazy to do so. As early as 1994, people like Hatchell had been conned. In the sixteen years since then, your “liberal” “intellectual leaders” have continued to nap, snore and fail.

"A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination."

Whoa! That sentence appears at ....

The Daily Kos?

Nope.

Was written by....

TBogg?

Nope.

By any liberal/radical/left wing website or person you can name?

Afraid not, wingnuts.

The author of that summation of the charms of Gov. Quitter was conservative intellectual Stephen Bainbridge in a post on his website titled "It's getting embarrassing to be a conservative" and is the top item in his list of ten reasons why that is so.

Worse yet, he links to and cites a column in today's LA Times by another conservative thinker, David Klinghoffer, which is titled "From neocons to crazy-cons."

I can barely wait all the explanations about how these two losers are RINOs of the first order.

Will anyone demand their birth certificates?

We can only hope.

Revolt of the Wampsters.

Zack Wamp, an eight term member of the House of Representatives and maybe the next Governor of Tennessee, wants his state to think about seceding from the Union.

Wait. Zack Wamp?

Seriously, somebody named Zack Wamp got elected to Congress eight separate times and is considered a serious political figure in Tennessee?

If that's true, I think we owe it to the rest of the states to at least consider whether Tennessee leaving might be good idea. And, as long as we're at it, the more normally named but clearly insane Rick Perry can take Texas and join them.

As long as they leave us Nashville and Austin.

If the wingnuts really want to accuse the Obama Adminstration of racism...

...it's pretty easy.

As soon as any black person connected to the Administration in any shape or form, past or current, is accused of anything, that person is fired, dismissed, blacklisted, gone.

Meanwhile, the criminals from the Bush Administration, mostly if not entirely white, roam free about the land collecting big bucks from TV News Propaganda Networks, Right Wing charitable groups Non-Profits and other Wingnut Financial Support Systems.

The fetal position into which most of the Democratic Establishment curls up whenever someone on the Right pokes at them is really sad to see.

An echo from a Forum far away.

I'll give my old sparring mate James Hudnall this: he was flat-out nuts long before everybody else and he's hung on long enough that now he can make a sorta living at it.

There's something to be said for stick-to-it as a lifestyle. Not much, but something. 

"If you can control the conversation..."

We should also be very worried about efforts to undermine the free flow of information on the Internet.

Right now, a blog loads just as quickly as a corporate webpage. An email from your mother comes through just as smoothly as a bill notification from your bank. An independent bookstore can process your order as quickly as Barnes and Noble.

But top telecommunications companies have declared their interest in offering prioritized Internet service for companies who can pay for it. This could lead to the creation of a high--speed lane for wealthy corporations and transform the Internet from an open playing field into yet another place where powerful economic elites have a bigger megaphone than the rest of us.

Some of the same people who were instrumental in the Federalist Society's effort to change our legal system are now working to help corporations increase their control over the flow of information.

If you control the flow of information, you can control the conversation around important issues.

If you can control the conversation, you can change this country.

For those of us who live here on the internets, that's a key passage from a very important keynote speech that Sen. Al Franken gave to the Annual Convention of the American Constitutional Society on Thursday night.

Franken, that "awful comedian" that the righties fought so long and hard to defeat in favor of lightweight Norm Coleman, is one of the brightest lights in this very dim Congress of ours, strikingly more intelligent and thoughtful than most of his better known colleagues.

As I said, this was an important speech and you need to hear or read it all.

Tina from Upper Darby.

Tina Fey is a local gal and for that and other reasons (she's just good), I've followed her career for a long time. Way back before her name became nationally recognized (so far back I can't even find a draft of it on the hard drive), I was working on a short story called "The Man Who Loved Tina Fey," which was about a crazy guy lusting after her on Saturday Night Live each weekend and what finally drove him over the edge.

Fey has just been named the winner of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts. She's the youngest winner to date. The award is clearly based on her work as head writer for SNL and as the creator and star of the excellent but overlooked by too many viewers 30 Rock.

I understand she did a very funny take-down of a minor political flash in the pan over the last year or so which got a lot of attention, but I can't imagine that it could be any funnier than the real thing.

Say this for Rand Paul...

Despite his virtually incoherent macho babble which revs up the masses and the passes for brilliance among the Libertarian crowd (and will win him a column on the Washington Post editorial pages as a consolation prize if he loses the election), the boy is not afraid to show his feminine side.

I mean, being afraid of being interviewed by David Gregory, who has maintained the Meet the Press tradition so firmly established by Tim Russert--softball questions, especially to Repugnants--without even bothering with the occasional, and usually silly and meaningless, "gotcha" which would send the Villagers' hearts all a-twitter in Timmy's time--being afraid of Equivalency* Dave is about as soft and wimpy as you can get.

*If he can't say "but, on the other hand" every couple of sentences, he's done.

The gift that keeps on giving?

Will that be Rand Paul's function in the coming months? He's certainly off to a great start.

My third most right-wingiest friend says he will win in Kentucky easily. That's also the conventional wisdom. We shall see. I think we are all going to learn a whole lot about Libertarian philosophy and beliefs over the summer and it will be fascinating to see how we feel about them.

My third most right-wingiest friend, by the way, is a big fan of Sarah Palin and his deepest regret is that he knows she would lose in a landslide were she to dare run for president (and lose all that easy income, not a chance). His other great regret is that the same is true of Newt Gingrich, who he thinks is almost the genius that Newt himself believes he is.

Just imagine what the top two right wing friends believe. You think it's easy being me?

Update: Rand as gift? That didn't take long, did it?