2008

One thing about wingnuts: Once they latch on to a lie they like, there’s virtually nothing that will get them to let go of it.

Take Scott Malensek, a writer over at the wingnut blog Flopping Aces:

In fact, most of the WMD claims that were made before the invasion turned out to be true.

No, mumbles. Those claims were pretty much dismissed as fantasy years ago, as Media Matters has documented:

Sometimes I wonder if humankind is just too damned stupid to survive. Then I hear of brilliant kids like Stanislaw Gunkel, who champion the power of reason and logic, and I realize we’ve got a pretty decent chance:

My mom told me that I shouldn't base my election analysis on "feelings" (I like him/her) or "beliefs" (I share his/her beliefs) but on logical arguments. She asked me to create my own rational explanations for my support of Obama. Here is one of my arguments:

McCain and Palin are not be qualified to be President / Vice President of the U.S. The President's job is to do good for the country and the world. To do good for the country, the President must make smart decisions on important situations.

Governor Palin believes the world is 6000 years old. This is absurd. This is not a rational belief. This is a mistake. Scientists, experiments and evidence have shown this to be completely false. Therefore, she is not rational. If she is not rational, she should not be allowed to be President or Vice President.

Please vote for Barack Obama.

Go get ‘em, Stas.

(hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans and the Ad Council have launched CommunityOfVeterans.org, a resource for veterans of our two most recent wars.

The mental health consequences of combat threaten to overwhelm a new generation of veterans. There are 1.7 million men and women who have served, or are currently serving, in Iraq and Afghanistan. About 1 in 5 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are suffering from a mental health injury, ranging from depression to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as a result of their service.

Less than 1% of the U.S. population has served or is serving in the current conflicts and when they return home, their sense of isolation is often magnified. This campaign’s long-term objective is to decrease the depression and PTSD-related outcomes among returning Vets by taking a two-pronged approach — encouraging Veterans to join other Veterans at the first ever online community exclusive to OIF/OEF Vets, and separately, to empower their Friends and Family by helping them learn how to start constructive conversations. The challenges facing returning vets are myriad but with support from other Veterans, family, and friends the issues can be effectively dealt with.

Veterans can visit CommunityOfVeterans.org to connect with other vets. The companion site for the families and friends of veterans, SupportYourVet.org, is currently under construction.

(hat tip: Talking Points Memo)

Political cartoonist Ted Rall offers a less-than-glittering appraisal of the state of the American polity:

…[V]ery nearly half of the American electorate voted Republican. After seven years of not finding (or looking for) Osama. After five years of horror in Iraq. After eight years of shrinking paychecks. After everything that's happened, nearly half of voters wanted more of the same.

If the Republicans had picked a better candidate, they would have won. If Obama had presented a truly distinct alternative to conservatism — socialized healthcare, say, or opposing both stupid wars rather than the least popular stupid one — he would have lost. Conservatism? Dead? Not a chance.

A change is gonna come. But this ain't it.

The election of Barack Obama is a first step towards an American future based on rationality, justice, and compassion — not an end in itself. There is still much work to be done.

I’ve been seeing a lot of this from the wingnuts in recent days:

Robert at American and Proud:

Working together is a two way street Barack Hussein Obama and when you were on the other side of the street, you never exhibited ANY “working together” traits, neither did HARRY REID or NANCY PELOSI. So “Working together as you call it, really means “Kneel before me”.

Kneeling will not be happening in the conservative realm.. Buck Farack Obama.

Ken Marrero at Publius’ Forum:

I say, Obama will be the President; but he will never be my President.

Raven at And Rightly So:

Just say no to Barry.

“Emperor” Misha at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler:

So now that you’ve finally gotten your Messiah elected, you “52 percenters” are all about making up with us “48 percenters”, working together and promising to listen to us and respect us even, it is to laugh, “fight for us?”

For the sake of “unity?”

…you are very cordially invited to go fuck yourselves in anatomically impossible ways with rusty, sharp farm tools.

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ:

Sorry, folks. No frakkin’ sale. We remember “Jesusland.”… You spent the last eight years engaged in a disgusting orgy of divisive political hatred and now you want to play nice and pretend we’re all united now?

So it looks like America has its own little cadre of dead-enders — refuseniks who are determined to do everything they can to hold this country back from the progress that it must make to ensure a secure and prosperous future.

And to them I say: Go for it. Please.

John Amato point out that all this childish obtuseness from the right is a good thing:

I saw this last week and didn’t get a chance to make the clip, but Bay Buchanan was on CNN and told us how the right wing will bring bipartisanship to the table as Obama takes office.

BUCHANAN: Well, it all depends on which direction the country—Obama wants to take the country. If he is really going to govern from the center and recognizes that the nation is center to right, then we’re gonna work with him, just as we worked with Bill Clinton to get welfare reform…

Obama won a clear mandate to lead this country the way he sees fit and America wants to get things done. So this statement by Buchanan, and dozens of other conservative talking heads like her in the days since the election, is very dangerous for the Right. If they are perceived as obstructionists during this time of heavy economic crisis then their brand of politics will be damaged all the more.

Personally, I hope they do it. They helped make the case for Obama with their constant personal attacks as well as calling him a “Socialist” and a “Marxist.” Keep up the good work, guys and gals. You are making my job so much easier.

The more the wingnut dead-enders sit and whine and hold their breaths till they turn blue, the more they will marginalize themselves. I certainly hope they will make good on their promise to do nothing but obstruct, obstruct, obstruct for the next four years. There is little that would benefit the tone of political discourse in this country as much as seeing these mindless fanatics make very public asses of themselves.

The wingnut right is having a field day blaming the election of Barack Obama for recent drops in the stock market. The facts, as usual, are a bit more complex.

To wit:

One cannot expect a wingnut to pay any attention to the facts. Such complex mental gymnastics are far too much work.

(hat tip: Matthew Yglesias)

Lewis Lapham underscores the essential nature of the intellectual bankruptcy of the American right:

How does one reconcile the demand for small government with the desire for an imperial army, apply the phrases "personal initiative" and "self-reliance" to corporation presidents utterly dependent on the federal subsidies to the banking, communications, and weapons industries, square the talk of "civility" with the strong-arm methods of Kenneth Starr and Tom DeLay, match the warmhearted currencies of "conservative compassion" with the cold cruelty of "the unfettered free market," know that human life must be saved from abortionists in Boston but not from cruise missiles in Baghdad? In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on federal housing, an essay on the payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or the wonder of the U.S. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale—money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak.

But if a set of coherent ideas was hard to find in all the sermons from the mount, what was not hard to find was the common tendency to believe in some form of transcendent truth. A religious as opposed to a secular way of thinking. Good versus Evil, right or wrong, saved or damned, with us or against us, and no light-minded trifling with doubt or ambiguity. Or, more plainly and as a young disciple of Ludwig Von Mises had said, long ago in the 1980s in one of the hospitality tents set up to welcome the conservative awakening to a conference on a beach at Hilton Head, "Our people deal in absolutes."

Just so, and more's the pity. In place of intelligence, which might tempt them to consort with wicked or insulting questions for which they don't already possess the answers, the parties of the right substitute ideology, which, although sometimes archaic and bizarre, is always virtuous.

The hysterical wingnut who blogs under the imaginative moniker “LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder” whines piteously about a recent report that a man wearing a McCain T-shirt was arrested for disorderly conduct:

All this guy was doing was wearing a McCain Palin shirt and was manhandled and shoved into a police car and arrested.

This comes from WND

This is ridiculous. For those who care to exercise their 1st amendment rights… they no longer exist thanks to the brownshirts for Obamasiah.

Well, if the bellwether for the termination of our First Amendment rights is that someone got arrested while wearing a T-shirt, then poor ol’ Mental here is about four years late to the party.

Nobel laureate Al Gore has proposed a bold and sweeping plan to move this country towards a renewable-energy economy, while at the same time revitalizing our economy and striking at the core causes of climate change:

Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.

…

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.

Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with “smart” features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid — $400 billion over 10 years — pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.

Third, we should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. Approximately 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from buildings — and stopping that pollution saves money for homeowners and businesses. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.

Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.

…

Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.

Mr. Gore is exactly right about courage. It will take courage — a massive national expression of courage — to take the steps needed to alter the economic and energy landscape of the United States in the ways his plan proposes. But courage is something that Americans have never lacked. Those of us who care about the future of this nation must join together and make these changes happen.

(hat tip: BoingBoing)

John Cole points out that Sarah Palin’s Alaska balances its budget on the backs of everyone who uses petroleum — and that the state is the second-largest recipient of federal aid to state and local government per capita.

But it’s not socialism. Oh no.