Political Animals

UPDATE 03/18/10 10:25 AM EDT: Jim Hoft, leading wingnut fuckwad, decides to ignore the facts to smear Obama (again):

Obama Says “Louisiana Purchase” in Obamacare Will Cover Earthquake in Hawaii… Um… What Earthquake in Hawaii?

In 1868 there was a major earthquake in Hawaii that killed 77 people. In 1975 an earthquake in Hawaii killed 2 people.

Despite Jimbo’s best efforts to shove history down the ol’ memory hole, reality comes along and smacks Jimbo upside his empty little head:

In fact, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake hit Hawaii on October 15, 2006. On October 16, 2006, Bush stated:

The President today declared a major disaster exists in the State of Hawaii and ordered Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts in the area struck by an earthquake that occurred on October 15, 2006, and related aftershocks.

Federal funding is available to State and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations on a cost-sharing basis in the counties of Hawaii, Honolulu, Kauai, and Maui and the City of Honolulu for debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance.

Whoops. Nice try, Jimbo. By all means, keep those lies coming. Lying is the only talent you have.

Shorter Jeff Schreiber:

• Having had my face rubbed in the fact that my accusations regarding the Democrats’ use of the self-executing rule exposed me as the laughable hypocrite that I am, I will now pretend that the Republicans used this tactic just once to fix an itty-bitty clerical error. Please ignore the historical fact that the Republicans have used the tactic more than 190 times. God forbid that I confuse my readers with any actual facts.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.

Jeff Schreiber is clearly a man of sterling character and scrupulous honesty. Just ask him. But do not, under any circumstances, pay any attention to what he actually does.

Like so much of the wingnut blogosphere, Widdle Jeffie is whining about the proposed use of the self-executing rule to pass health care reform in the House. This procedure will avoid an actual House vote on the Senate’s bill, by attaching the Senate bill to a package of fixes to be passed by the House. This, apparently, is just too too much for poor widdle Jeffie, and he lets the fauxtrage flow:

Are we really surprised anymore?

That’s the question I keep coming back to, as it becomes more and more and more apparent — not that it wasn’t already abundantly clear — that the Democratic Party leadership is prepared to pay any price and bend any rule and destroy any career necessary to bring about whatever procedural nightmare will equate to passage of their radical health care reform agenda.

A brand new headline from the Washington Post, just crossing the computer a little while ago, informs us that the “House May Try to Pass Senate Health-Care Bill Without Voting On It.” I can’t help but wonder if it’s even news anymore.

…

Why should we be surprised that [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] will look for a possibly unconstitutional, definitely improper procedural loophole to use in the process of ramming said legislation down our throat?

You know, as a guy who runs a Web site like America’s Right, I look at an article like the one in question and think to myself: “Gee whiz, Jeff … is there even any value in pointing out that Nancy Pelosi has, yet again, shown that she simply does not care what America thinks?” And part of me says “no.” Part of me believes that, for Nancy Pelosi, disregarding the will of the American people comes as naturally as breaking campaign promises does for this president. The other part of me, however, cannot help but draw attention to it all. Its maddening.

So, are we really surprised anymore? Of course not. Are we outraged? Absolutely.

There’s certainly something missing from Widdle Jeffie’s tantrum that shouldn’t surprise anyone. That would be the fact that the self-executing rule procedure that has him wetting his pants has long been a favorite of Republicans:

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

On April 26, the Rules Committee served up the mother of all self-executing rules for the lobby/ethics reform bill. The committee hit the trifecta with not one, not two, but three self-executing provisions in the same special rule. The first trigger was a double whammy: “In lieu of the amendments recommended by the Committees on the Judiciary, Rules, and Government Reform now printed in the bill, the amendment in the nature of a substitute consisting of the text of the Rules Committee Print dated April 21, 2006, modified by the amendment printed in part A of the report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution, shall be considered as adopted in the House and the Committee of the Whole.”

The substitute submitted by the Rules Committee did not combine all the amendments adopted by the three reporting committees, as is customarily done. Instead, it deleted two amendments adopted by the Judiciary Committee that would have required disclosure of lobbyists’ contacts with Members and staff, and lobbyists’ solicitation and transmission of campaign contributions to candidates.

It then further amended its own substitute by automatically deleting a third Judiciary amendment requiring a Government Accountability Office study of lobbyist employment contracts.

So, are we really surprised any more by Jeff Schreiber’s habit of carefully failing to mention relevant facts? Of course not.

Are we outraged? Nope.

But we are entertained. We’re pointing and laughing at “honest” Jeff Schreiber and his self-defeating, self-impeaching antics. Again.

(hat tips: Daily Kos and Media Matters)

For some wingnuts, lying isn’t enough. No, they have to prove how jaw-droppingly stupid they are by telling the most transparently ridiculous lies that they can possibly imagine.

As I noted a short time ago, Paul Mitchell whined about a Mississippi state law that he hadn’t read and insisted that he would not read. That’s an example of a wingnut deliberately cultivating his own ignorance, which is of course an extremely common occurrence. But that wasn’t enough ignorance for this good ol’ boy. Nope, now he’s decided to compound the lie by claiming that he never wrote about the law — while simultaneously admitting that he mentions the law in the very first paragraph of his earlier post.

Paul, the imbecile store called. They’re running out of you.

Shorter Kender:

• I yearn for the good old days, when childbirth was dirty and dangerous. That’s what put us on the moon, after all.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard, and shamelessly pilfered from Sadly, No.

The usual wingnut imbeciles have taken to braying that the “Coffee Party” movement is mere “astroturf” — as compared, of course, the the oh-so-genuine “Tea Party” movement. In reality, of course, the “Tea Party” movement is almost pure astroturf, the creation of slick right-wing PR firms like Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and media consultants reaped over a million dollars from the so-called “Tea Party Express” bus tour last year.

Further evidence of the astroturf nature of the “tea party” movement has come to light:

Tea Party activists from across the country have come to Washington for a three-week long “Take The Town Halls to Washington” rally, an effort to lobby undecided House Democrats to vote against health care reform. At a press conference for the event on Friday, the Daily Caller spotted signs and buttons clearly paid for by the Republican National Committee. Activists distributed “red-white-and-blue buttons and signs emblazoned with the words ‘Listen to Me!’” — an official RNC slogan — with disclaimers at the bottom of the signs reading “Paid for by the Republican National Committee”…

Someone explain to me, please, why anyone should listen to these paid shills.

Dan Riehl now confirms that yes, he did in fact intend to wish Landra Reid dead:

In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say. What more fitting way to greet Democrats sick health care reform proposal than with the eliminationist rhetoric it and the Democrats deserve.

And he justifies his hatemongering with the infantile but-Mommy-everyone-else-is-doing-it excuse.

I’ll make it plain once again: Dan Riehl and most of his fellow wingnuts have the moral intelligence of sewer rats.

According to the imbecile wingnuts, the United States has never tortured anyone. Strange that they never stop to ask themselves why so much evidence regarding the use of not-torture by this country has vanished:

• Before May 2003: 15 of 92 torture tapes erased or damaged
• Early 2003: Dunlavey’s paper trail “lost”
• Before August 2004: John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s torture memo emails deleted
• June 2005: most copies of Philip Zelikow’s dissent to the May 2005 CAT memo destroyed
• November 8-9, 2005: 92 torture tapes destroyed
• July 2007 (probably): 10 documents from OLC SCIF disappear
• December 19, 2007: Fire breaks out in Cheney’s office
  

If none of this material is evidence of torture, why has it disappeared?

Dan Riehl, a wingnut dickwad with the moral intelligence of a brain-damaged tapeworm, believes that Harry Reid’s seriously injured wife should be killed:

Isn’t It Time To Euthanize Reid’s Wife?

I’m not sure I quite understand this, given that cost is so important as a burden to taxpayers when it comes to health care. If Democrats want so badly to abort babies because of it, why are we bothering with someone who has a broken neck and back at 69? It sounds to me like she’s pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with. Aren’t we at least going to get a vote on it?

Sen. Reid’s daughter Lana Reid Barringer, 48, who was driving the mini-van, and his wife, Landra G. Reid, 69, a passenger, were both injured. Landra suffered a broken back and a broken neck in the crash; Barringer suffered minor injuries, Sen. Reid’s office said Thursday.

I realize her crook of a husband and his pals in Congress have excluded themselves from the mess they’re going to compel everyone else to join, but we’re still paying the bills, are we not? I don’t see that she’s worth it at this point, frankly. I can’t recall her ever doing anything for me.

Come on, Harry – do your civic duty. The nation’s broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don’t bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?

Reid has stayed at his wife’s bedside throughout the day Friday and returned to the Capitol in the late afternoon.

This should not surprise us, of course — Riehl the moral vacuum has already admitted that he allowed his gay brother to die alone. The amusing part is that Riehl then throws a tantrum when Media Matters reproduced his post without comment. The Whiny-Ass Titty Baby actually has the gall to complain that

They have no right to take exception to my post.

Really, fucktard? Who does somebody have to be, before you will permit them to take exception to your posts?

I do so hope that Dan Riehl is proud of becoming the standard-bearer for the self-absorbed morally empty wingnuts that are poisoning the political landscape of a once-great nation.

It is, of course, an axiom that Jeff Schreiber of America’s Right is a man of unimpeachable character — just ask him. It is therefore a distinct honor to present yet another example of Schreiber’s scrupulous honesty.

In a blog post entitled Justice Obama? You Betcha!, Jeff Schreiber stated:

I, for one, would love to see Barack Obama on the Supreme Court. I just don’t think, ideological slant or otherwise, he really has a grasp of the law or of the Constitution, the document he believes to be “deeply flawed.”

Schreiber was challenged to provide the entire quote, rather than just two carefully selected words, and to present that quote in context. Of course, he responded promptly:

“I think it is a remarkable document … the original Constitution as well as the Civil War Amendments, but I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture, the Colonial culture nascent at that time. And in that sense, I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

Look at that quote. Just look at it and marvel at it. It is truly a shining exemplar of painstaking accuracy, as one can see by noting how very closely it matches Obama’s actual words (which can be heard at 45:26 in the original broadcast):

“I think it is a remarkable document, I think… the original Constitution, as well as — as well as the Civil War amendments, but I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture — the colonial culture nascent at that time. African-Americans were not — first of all, they weren’t African-Americans. The Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the framers. I think that, as Richard said, it was a nagging problem in the same way that, these days, we might think of environmental issues or some other problem that, where you have to balance, you know, cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth. And, in that sense, I think we can say that the Constitution reflected a enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

You see? You see how perfectly Jeff Schreiber reported Obama’s words? Is that not astonishing?

It is clear that everyone on the far right of the great American political debate owes Jeff Schreiber a huge debt of gratitude for setting the standards of honesty and character where he has.