“It was kind of a very rapid process. Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm. I think we probably should have had more discussion about it, given the blowback that there is.”—John McCain, explaining why he and 46 other Republican senators only acted like idiots. I mean, it’s not…
Tag: Republican idiots
Ross versus Ezra: No way! Your crazies are way crazier than our crazies!
Ross Douthat picks a fight with Ezra Klein over whether Obama Derangement Syndrome is more intense than Bush Derangement Syndrome.Klein links BDS to 9/11, but struggles to find comparable causality for ODS: “Bush Derangement Syndrome sought extraordinary explanations for extraordinary events; Obama Derangement Syndrome seeks extraordinary explanations for an ordinary presidency.” Sniffs Ross, “This … does…
The Republican Party, beneath contempt and beyond it
The Republican Party reached a new low yesterday, when House Republicans voted to hold IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress for exercising her constitutional right not to testify against herself. Crazy is the new normal for Republicans. Although they talk of the Constitution and the rule of law, they believe in neither. They…
Big Picture Bullshit
Apostate Republican David Frum and apostate jerk* Robert Samuelson both back the camera up from the current fray di DC to give us the big picture. Says Frum: Why are American politicians playing so rough? We have moved into an era of scarcity. Once it seemed possible to have the spending Democrats wanted, financed at…
O Lucky Obama!
A few weeks ago—or was it a few lifetimes?—I was remarking that it couldn’t be possible that President Obama could slide out of an utterly gratuitous, entirely self-inflicted mini-war with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with the help of Vladimir Putin, but that’s exactly what happened. But of course that was only a warm-up. Now the…
Republicans who want to break things
Back in the day, we talked a lot about smashing the state.* Well be careful what you wish for, eh? Because now the state actually is being smashed, but it’s the Republicans who are doing the smashing. How did this role reversal come about? Newt Gingrich is certainly one of the architects of disorder, a…
An Embarrassment of Libertarians
Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wonders, politely, why the fuck the libertarians get all the weirdos, riffing on Rand Paul’s aide and co-author, Jack Hunter, in a piece titled “Rand Paul’s Aide: A Dunce on the Confederacy.” Full-bore libertarian Matt Welch expresses similar thoughts at Reason, under the snappy title “Rand Paul Co-Author Jack…
Republicans to Hispanics: Hell yes we love you! Just not right now!
Did I predict this? Well, probably not, but, anyway, Bill Kristol and Rich Lowry, two of the biggest DC dicks going, have joined forces to take out the immigration-reform bill, which was likely 99.44% dead in the House of Representatives already. As about a million people have pointed out, Kristol is playing the same game…
Mary Matalin, Bill Kristol: NSA good, IRS bad
Which government agency should you hate? The one that secretly spies on you and threatens to apply criminal penalties to those who expose its, um, crimes, or the one that operates openly and investigates and exposes its own failures to apply the law fairly? You guessed it, the latter. Right-wing windbags Mary Matalin and Bill…
Obama Woes, and how the Republicans never fail to remind us that they would only make things worse
President Obama, if he isn’t looking mortal, is at least looking awkward these days. The current “triple scandal” will, I think, end up costing the President little, but it does give the Republicans something to yell about, and yelling to no effect is what the current crop of Republicans does best. The Administration’s handling of…