Whiskey Fire

I Laffed Too

The PJ Wettler.

Well, here at least is a sign of sanity in the Republican leadership.

Sanity? Republican leadership? Gosh! How so?

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, says he “burst into laughter” Thursday when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner outlined the administration proposal for averting the fiscal cliff.  He wasn’t trying to embarrass Geithner, McConnell says, only responding candidly to his one-sided plan, explicit on tax increases, vague on spending cuts.

Oh the fun it never ends -- and for those who love fun, the PJ Wettler finds it, the fun:

Obama also wants an unlimited debt ceiling, or to be more accurate, no debt ceiling at all. Couple that with a future of no budgets and a president who knows he has hacked Congress into irrelevance by using Harry Reid as an adjunct of his West Wing, and you have a president who is offering a “deal” one would offer to a totally defeated and decimated foe.

Well... yeah.

We can quibble about the specifics but... yeah.

The congressional Republicans don’t have a lot of leverage, but they’re not totally defeated and decimated. They do control the House and most governorships.

So?

I mean, because....

If Obama keeps this up, we will go over the cliff. It will be his fault, but the media will not hold him to account.

That's some leverage you have there, then, chief.

This game is about destroying what’s left of the checks on Obama’s power, and destroying the Republican party at the same time. There’s no other way to explain why he would have Geithner offer such a one-sided, unserious deal.

The Republican party sure does need destroying, I won't lie.

Anyway, this is the PJ Wettler, so none of it is true. But ain't it pretty to think so?

A Rose for Robertson

When Pat Robertson dies the townspeople will make the gruesome discovery of Homer Barron's corpse in his sheets.

MAS.

This is the best thing ever. EVER.

Don't Go over That Briar Cliff

So the very wise and not at all ridiculous Charles Krauthammer has some Sensible Advice for the House Republican Majority.

Charles Krauthammer argued that, having in essence conceded on the tax issue, Republicans should not cave on the issue of entitlement reform. If they do, he says, President Obama will play them for fools. “Now, [the president] says, after Republicans give up their one issue on taxes, ‘I’ll discuss a bargain next year,’” Krauthammer said. “Of course he wants that, because that’ll be at a time when Republicans are defrocked, disrobed, and disarmed, they will have nothing to bargain with…any Republican who buys this is a fool.” 

Krauthammer insisted that Republicans have more bargaining power in this process than meets the eye, because President Obama “wants a successful second term” and “if it starts by going over the cliff, it starts with a second recession, two million unemployed, and a wrecked second term.”

Right, because "the Republicans stuck to their guns and caused a second and worse recession because they wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare and give the utra-rich tax breaks" is a message that is Full of Win.

If the Democrats lose to these lunatics, it's because they are, uh, Democrats.

Speaking of Idiots...

Here is something from Big Dumb Dead Breitbart. It is, I believe, sincere.

Liberal film critics are seeing red over how "Red Dawn" showcases patriotic high school students defending their country against North Korean invaders.

This is very interesting.

No critics would dare sympathize with the real-life Communist country, a crippled nation known for its starving populace, lack of freedom and militaristic bent.

Surely, such talk is the handiwork of wisdom.

Yet a gaggle of pro-North Korea types gathered to protest "Red Dawn" recently all the same, decrying the film's use of the country as the villain du jour as well as taking swipes against America.

Ths carries the Imprimatur of Science, for, as all Adepts are aware, "pro-North Korea types" typically flock in gaggles. They are notorious for such gagglistic behavior. Thus encouraged -- follow the links!

A "gaggle" would appear to be four strange people gathered in Manhattan. 

How those four strange people are any more loonball than the people who poured an awful lot of money into a propaganda film about American high school students resisting the impending North Korean military hegemony over the continental US -- well, that remains a mystery.

I mean, here is the Crushing Rejoinder proffered by Wingnuttia to the protesters:

Whether the proclivity of newcomers to favor government management of the economy will translate into increased support for The Great, Dear, Omniscient Leader is a matter for future generations to decide, but the spirited crowd of approximately half a dozen devoted communists seemed to be solidly in the corner of Kim Jong-Un and opposed to the shameless political dwarfs behind the cinematic reincarnation of this motion picture.

I suppose there is some conceivable explanation for how the imbeciles who remade "Red Dawn" with North Korea as the Supervillain are not "shameless political dwarfs," but fortunately for myself, I am not the Breitbartian apparatchik tasked with inventing that horseshit.

An All Lesbian Supreme Court

Maybe we'll alow a token Papist to do the clerking. The Rising Totalitarian Gynocracy is not ungenerous.

(Wingnuts is weird.)

Things That Should Happen But Won't

Shelly Silver absolutely should be tossed out as the Speaker of the NY Assembly, but he won't be, because slime pays. Ain't state capitol politics grand?

True Stories of the Right Wing Truth

One is predisposed to admire talking dogs. The capacity for intelligible speech, as most scientific observers agree, is a skill few canines attain.

Hence when one encounters a puppy capable of burping intelligbly the lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner," one is understandably impressed.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

Woof woof!

However.

Before we all go merrily on together, munching the kibbles (or drawing "final lines"):

The best way to get Republicans to read a book about reaching out for the black vote, I thought, was to detail the Democratic Party’s long history of maltreatment of blacks. After all, the party was based in the South for 100 years after the war, and all of the ugly racism we associate with that region was enacted and enforced by Democratic politicians. I was surprised that such a book didn’t already exist.

This is appallingly stupid.

I thought knowing the Democratic Party’s pre-1964 history of racism, which is indisputable, would give Republicans a story to tell when they went before black groups to solicit votes. I thought it would also make Republicans more sympathetic to the problems of the black community, many of which are historical in their origins. Analyses by economists and sociologists show that historical racism still holds back African-Americans even though it has diminished radically since the 1960s.

Holy shit.

So I wrote Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Unfortunately, it was published the day Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses.

Yeah, well, Obama winning isn't why that book is embarrassing.

It is the assumption that "black groups," and also "people with access to consensus reality," are absolute morons, that is the problem there.

If you don't know why the GOP now wins the South, bless you, have a biscuit.

Some dogs can learn English, apparently. But they'll still eat their own shit.

Can't blame them.

It's their nature.

MAS. Bark bark.

MUCHO MAS. Just to say, while it is all very swell that Bruce Bartlett, David Frum, and Andrew Sullivan have courageously declared themselves non-wingnuts, that hardly qualifies them as people who aren't boring idiots generally. "Finally, after much inner struggle, I realized that the Rush Limbaugh view of the world has its flaws" is not, in the final analysis, a very impressive intellectual manifesto. Here is Sullivan:

I endured the same kind of thing, although I was much less polite than Bruce and had an independent platform. But it's still remarkable to me that I have not been invited on Fox for a decade - even to discuss or debate my book on, er, conservatism and fundamentalism. My book, The Conservative Soul, was not reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, and given a formal excommunication/evisceration by National Review's Jonah Goldberg.

Jesus fucking Christ. Reading these people is like watching the lost footage of Ingmar Bergman's version of The Terror of Tiny Town.

Many of My Best Friends Are Racists

Someone at Townhall has decided to explain to us the Curse of Racism. HARK! TO THIS SENSIBLE ADVICE!

It's quite wonderful, this Townhall piece. Here:

I’m not going to fall back on the old saw "Some of my best friends are black (or Hispanic)."

And then in the very next sentence:

Some of my friends over the years have been black, and my best friend in high school was in fact, a native of Mexico.

Holy tits of Santa.

Whatever. This Townhall git is however instructive insofar as his cluelessness takes us. He wonders why black people voted for Obama, and ends up, no shit, here:

When the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, they eventually ran out of enemies to lock up, and began arresting seemingly loyal party members out of paranoia and a need to maintain a grip on the country. People with power will do many things to hold on to that power, and if you step out of line, then suddenly, you may become The Other. 

Take care that in your zeal you do not become the thing you claim to despise. You may be one complaint away from becoming one of us.

If you think the Democratic Party has become the Khmer Rouge, you've either lost your mind, or you have some special personal reason to be bothered by Reconstruction that involves cheesy vampire fan-fiction. Or, worse, improperly digested family history. In either case, shut it, the rest of us are moving on.

Which brings us, lamentably, to Jonah Goldberg, who informs black people that they are idiots for voting Democratic because the Southern Strategy never happened, Condoleeza Rice did happen, and the GOP didn't openly try to suppress the black vote as long ago as last month.

MAS. Got banned from Chicago Boyz, ochone. For this --

Friends

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday for lots of reasons. This is not to say that I like holidays...

What I mean is, thanks for reading. Whiskey Fire is not all of me, but it is a part of me that needs to be left uncorked.

What brings you back I have no idea, redsnouts.

And BAD BRAINS

 

Zombie Turkey Attack

Wingnuts have many cherished Thanksgiving traditions, such as shoving stuffing up their asses, high-fiving themselves for fondly-imagined rhetorical victories over liberals ("Pass the gravy?" "Drop dead, pinko!"), and passing on bullshit tall tales about how the Pilgrims learned a Valuable Lesson about the Evils of Socialism.

Honestly, this is a hoary, hairy, ancient far-right chestnut:

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

They serve up this gibberish every year like it's, I don't know, pasta carbonara or something equally dreadful and hobby-horsical.

The real fun though is with the cretin whom I have just quoted at length attempting to sound smart in his own comments. Get a load of this. This is funny.

Here he is challenged:

Which is not very clear -- but that's not the Fun. Here is the response:

Uh...

Jerry Bowyer doesn't know what the word "tendentiously" means, does he?