These People Are Crazy

Over to the NRO's Corner and nut case name of Stanley Kurtz argues that because of Benghazi Obama to save his skin ought or will

The answer, I think, is clear. President Obama needs to issue an immediate executive order disbanding Fox News.

You see, he suggests,

it is very likely that an executive order disbanding Fox News would substantially undercut public attention to the Benghazi story, thus restoring President Obama’s prestige in the world.

Kurtz is nutz.

Civility

So, I got a Romney fundraiser phone call. I figured I would play along and suggested that while I would vote for the him I had insufficient funds to offer any financial support. In the course of wheedling, or attempting to wheedle, the spandolax out of my wallet, the nice young woman on the phone informed that should we fail to defeat Obama he would "burn this country to the ground."

Obviously, this kind of language isn't an affront to either decency or comity nor yet an example of Romney trying to divide America into those who would vote for him and those who are going to burn the country to the ground, which recent polling suggests divides the country about 50/50. Nope, because if it were it would make mock of all the other bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, the Republicans and the Right more generally are flinging about in their increasing desperate attempt to impose the 19th century on an unwilling 21st.

Summer Holiday

I have been a relatively longish one, which is soon to end. But as a way of easing back into the world of words. All the bikes had Bontrager Race Hardcase tires, the bad weather bike has now Continental tourers of some sort and in the winter studded. Why  Hardcase, you ask:

The shredded rubber was over 2/3 of the whole tire. I don't know for how long I rode around on this but it was at least 3 weeks. Plus the  bike sat for a week before I changed the tire today and, get this, when I took it off the bike it was still hard as rock. When you need to get from here to there and back again without worrying about a flat, Hardcases it is.

Also over to Gin and Tacos,  Ed mocks Sarah Palin's bbq cum fundraiser garb and insists that her decision to "dress like the Lord Mayor of MILF Island" rendered her no longer a serious person. Leaving aside the obvious sexist bullshit in the MILF comment, remember when Obama wore a bike helmet or blue jeans some jackasses thought looked like "mom jeans"? 

That kind of "analysis" was stupid, pointless crap then and it is now. You sir are on notice.

Grammar

If Obama did claim that business people didn't build that, then if follows the mega-maniac Andrew McCarthy just accused five GOP senators of being in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood.

But it is Ms. Abedin’s parents and brother who have drawn the attention of the five House GOP members. They all have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood — the organization itself or prominent members thereof.

Given that the clear anticedent of they has to be the nearest collective noun by the laws of grammar and syntax it must be members which means the GOP is infected with the radical Islamist gene and therefore to Gitmo with them.

Opposite Day

I was going to write something about David Brooks', professional idiot, latest monstrosity, but stopped when I realized that his evidence derived from "history Web sites that track such things" as rampage killings is almost assuredly Wikipedia and that all of his actual experience in "read[ing] through the assessments that have been done by the F.B.I., the Secret Service and various psychologists" is slighter than his regard for facts, intellectual honesty, and careful reading. So decided not to.

Instead lets consider the "you didn't build that" controversy.  Obama recently pointed out the obvious about the social nature of personal success and the right went nuts. Madison Wisconsin and other college towns have lower unemployment because bosses and investors know that they can get a highly educated work force. And they did not build the University or the fine public schools, the parks, and recreational infrastructure, etc.

Romney knows this, and I don't mean his remarks on the socialized nature of athletic success.  I don't  mean his borrow 20k from your folks to start a business to start a business notion; although, so one, so far as I know, picks their parents; therefore, those who can borrow succeed because of the luck of the draw.

This last point, I think, explains the virulence of the Right's response to Obama's bland truism. If success is a combination of luck and socialism, in its broadest sense, than failure is a combination of luck and socialism, or its lack, which -- in turn -- vitiates the whole of the Reactionary/Conservative/Neoliberal ideology. This fact of the matter means that the Right would have to disband, which they can't do. So they deny it even as they accept it as true.

Update, of sorts from Fox News more evidence that success grows from the efforts of others and ourselves:

Kilmeade: Clara, how do you feel about the President saying that you needed help to start this business. And just speak from — speak from within. All right, you know what? Let’s switch over to —
Younger sister Eliza yawns. Clara begins to speak.  
Kilmeade: Why don’t you answer that one?
Clara, age 7: I would say that’s rude because we worked very hard to build this business. But we did have help.
Kilmeade: And your help came from?
Clara, age 7: Our help came from our investors, our dad and stepmom, along with other friends and family.

And that says nothing about the roadway without which they would get no foot traffic.

UPDATE:
I just watched The Daily Show in which Louis Black made more or less the same argument. Great minds, or something, think similarly.

Appologize, Damn It

Some time ago the Right, like NRO whackdoodle Mona Charon, were lambasting Obama for his "disgraceful abandonment" of Chinese civil rights lawyer Chen Quangchen. Today we learn that he and his wife are on their way to America, land o the free.

It takes real skill to wrong about everything.

I Can Already Hear The Screams of Fake Outrage.

This Saturday, the USA Network is going to show a remastered version of the all-American classic To Kill A Mocking Bird.  President Obama is going to introduce it. Which brave conservative nutbar will be the first to call him a race pimp?

How Things Work

The ACA:

Vote

Where'd All The Money Go?

For Sam Stone's kids it was a hole in daddy's arm. For the 99% in the current jobless recovery, it's the hyper rich:

And yet somehow or another Obama is a socialist marxist scum.

Indeed

Obama, we are told, is a push over for the tough-talking Right wingers:



(video via)

Fight

Obama responds to Romney and Cos lies about fixing the auto industry.



I like the value stuff @1:59

Vote

One reason I'm still glad to have voted for Obama, he is comfortable in his own skin:

And another, he married a real American woman.



David Brooks, on the other hand, is an  idiot. In the course of an "essay" on Mitt Romney as an inauthentic human being but an authentic robotic sociopath,[1] admits that

I don’t actually know what sort of person Romney is. He’s a reticent man. He’s unwilling to talk about his roots, home and family history, so it is hard to understand what’s really going on in his head.

And there you have it. He writes a column about someone's personality while admitting he knows nothing about it. True, I guess, Brooks really wants to offer Romney advice on how to overcome his "appearance" of being a robotic sociopath but isn't Brooks a little to comfortable about writing from a position of complete ignorance.

[1] Brooks, of course, used some vague sociological language from some ancient book he sort of remembers from his undergraduate days but that's what he meant to say.

All Apologies

Various manics, including the robotic sociopath Mitt Romney have been castigating Obama for apologizing for the US. Many folks insist that's not true. Here is a list of the alleged apologies. As I read them, they are examples of Obama saying here is an error we made and we won't make that mistake again. If you think that is an apology fine; if, however,you think it's a bad thing, you're nuts.So, for example, on the whole Guantanamo torture deal, the President argues that

[t]here is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law--a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.
So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies.

As I read it, the Obama is  trying, although his failure to close the prison is a real disaster for his presidency, to lay out the reasons why Guantanamo was and is bad. It's not an apology; it's more of an admission of error.

If you watch this video, when MLK gets to a discussion of Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs he lays out the argument for doing what Obama did:



I have to say, I agree and I think it is high time that we went Obama and Kennedy one better and, in fact, as a state learned from our mistakes instead of just insisting we've learned. Besides which, when did dealing with reality become a sign of weakness?

David Brooks Failed to Pay Attention

For most of his Presidency, Obama has bent over backwards trying to make deals with the Republicans. In so doing, he has alienated many of his left-wing supporters. This isn't news. Today, however, David Brooks looks at Obama's wholly centrist scheme to raise taxes, cut spending, and fiddle with benefits and decides that Obama has become an ideologue. Brooks is, to be blunt, the silliest man on the planet.

It's not that Obama has become or will govern as a leftist but rather that the Republicans have steadfastly refused to engage in reasoned compromise because they are a bunch of idiots who, as it turns out, hate America's working class.

Justified

Allegedly, Obama's doing something Bush couldn't in a way totally different from Bush's notion of defeating "terror" by invading various nations, some of which had nothing to do with "terror," proves that Bush was right all along. There is also the notion out there by unnamed-highly-placed somebodies or another that it was torture that got the ball rolling. Peter King, for example, on the basis of nothing asserted that waterboarding led to the information. There is also the idea that Bush's sticktoitness made the killing of Osama possible. Remember that by the end of his time spent ruining all our nice things, Bush claimed that he had stopped worrying about Osama.

It seems to me that what this event shows is that Obama would have followed a different tactical and operational path had he been in office and, if getting OBL, was the end game he'd have gotten there sooner. Although I doubt that this will change the larger policy of blowing things up and killing people, one can always hope that Obama will declare victory and bring the troops home.

UPDATE:
It looks like torture played no role in the information gathering. Score one for humanism.

Enlightenment: German Edition

One of the enduring myths of old regime Prussia was the White Lady. Allegedly when a Prussian monarch was slated for death the White Lady appeared on a stair case. German speaking enlighteners hoped upon hope that proving there was no such thing as ghosts despaired of their failure to purge this mythic vision from the popular imagination. They didn't, however, quit trying to purge this mythic vision from the popular imagination because, they correctly thought, that purging this mythic, which is to say incorrect, vision from the popular imagination would benefit the population at large in two ways. The first would be the specific falsehood and the second would be the general. It was an optimistic  assessment of humanities ability to learn the difference between fact and fiction. Despite the specific failure, humanistic optimist like me support this kind of action. Fictions need to be shown to be fictions.

Today President Obama released his "long form" birth dealio proving he is an actual American citizen. Many on the Intertubes and its related nets are baffled by this decision. Their argument is, essentially, that these birther yahoos can never be satisfied and, therefore, Obama was wrong to try and show that their fictions were, in fact, fictions.

For me, Obama's decision was one more of the many ultimately successful attempts of making facts more powerful than fictions. So, I say, well done young pirate and way to continue the endless and necessary commitment to truth's triumph over lies.

Honesty the Best Policy

President Obama's spokesmodel said:

“If the president is presented with a bill that undermines critical priorities or national security through funding levels or restrictions, contains earmarks or curtails the drivers of long-term economic growth and job creation while continuing to burden future generations with deficits, the president will veto the bill.”

 Andrew Sullivan read it to mean that

Obama just said that even the Republicans' small cuts in defense would "undermine ... national security."

I take this an a nearly perfect example of intellectual dishonesty. Not only didn't the president say anything like that, he might, for all anyone knows, be referring to Boehner's refusal to let an unwanted project die as it does anything.  It's the sort of carefully moderated banality you'd expect from any politician. It certainly doesn't mean anything like what Sullivan's interpretation bolstered by a truncated quotation suggests.

It would be nice if folks would make some sort of rudimentary attempt at getting the facts right

Blaming Obama

The tax deal is appalling and shouldn't be passed as negotiated.  It's not appalling because Obama is a wretched human being; it's appalling because it is bad policy.  Gitmo's continuation is equally appalling.  But it isn't Obama who is responsible.  So while I agree that

[i]t is morally wrong to support a president who keeps open GITMO, escalates wars and begins new ones, gives taxpayers' monies to bail out banks, lowers workers' pay, and cuts taxes for the rich when the poor are desperate.

I disagree that Obama is responsible for all that stuff as he is one actor among many.  He is wrong about the taxes and wrong about the wage freeze but right about extending unemployment and right to try and stop GITMO over Congressional objections, right about DADT, the banks are paying back the money and propping up GM and Chrysler was the right thing to do, the health care reform is a good first step, and so on. If you were right all the time you'd be god or me.

Election Fallout

Did you see Obama's press conference?  Did you think that the press corps wanted him to rent his garments and rub ash in his hair? Me too. Did you think that Gingrich's suggestion that Obama take a short nap until the victors came to town was silly? Me too.  Did you find all the lies about the cost of the trip to India and points east idiotic?  Me too.  Do you think that retaining Pelosi as Minority Leader the right choice?  Me too.  Is the proper response here to double down and continue doing what is right and what works instead of triangulating and such?  Me too.  Do you think that Obama will continue to govern from the slightly left-of-center?  Me too.  Do you think that the Republicans and Conservative will continue to push an anti-American agenda wholly, as opposed to slightly, owned by corporations and the idiotically rich?  Me too.