Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

I wish it weren't possibly for McCain to sound any more stupid than he already does, but it seems that he's been topping his own record of fuckwittery daily. Can anyone other than the 28 percenters listen to inane babble like this and still think the man's some kind of straight-talking foreign policy genius (h/t The Carpetbagger Report)?

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a presidential candidate who tries this hard not to be taken seriously.

“I will look you in the eye and promise you that I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,” McCain said in response to a direct question from one of the 2,000 people in attendance at the college’s Pemberton campus gym.

McCain said the key to ending the long search for bin Laden was to increase the number of human spies abroad.

“We need better human intelligence. We need people who can swim in the water,” McCain said.

I see. First, I’m pretty sure that plenty of Americans, both in the military and in intelligence gathering, have learned to “swim in the water.”

Second, if reports are accurate, bin Laden is in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan. As far as I can tell, there are very few bodies of water, so swimming spies may have limited value.

But on a more serious point, McCain has talked about his intentions to get bin Laden before. In fact, in January, McCain hinted that he has a secret plan to attack to al Qaeda leader, telling reporters, “One thing I will not do is telegraph my punches. Osama bin Laden will be the last to know.”

One of the more frustrating things about listening to George W. Bush talk has always been the ways in which he sounded like an uninformed child. I’m afraid John McCain is quickly approaching the same level.How on earth can McCain “promise” to get bin Laden? He claims to have a plan to do so, but he won’t tell anyone what it is.

That may sound reasonable, just so long as you don’t think about it too much. McCain could, for example, share his secret plan with the White House, so it could be implemented now and the al Qaeda leader could be brought to justice before he can launch additional attacks, but McCain doesn’t want to.

I’m curious, how dumb does John McCain think we are?

I think McCain's been hanging about with right-wing mouth breathers a little too long. It's easy to bill yourself as a genius among imbeciles. What terrifies me is the certain knowledge that at least half this country is either too fucking stupid or too fucking uninformed to listen to McCain and hear the dumbshit behind the PR.

Every time I start to have a little bit of hope, every time I think McCain's finally gone and done the thing that will make him too ridiculous for a majority of Americans to swallow, I remember that we ended up with George W. Bush. Twice.

That's when I begin to fear that no matter how dumb McCain thinks we are, he's not setting his expectations low enough.

After all, the Republicon party should have 0 credibility by now. None. Zilch. It's horrifying to realize that their noise machine's still pumping out the propaganda at full volume, and views like this aren't so far outside the mainstream that they aren't instantly denounced (h/t Glenn Greenwald):

Laura Ingraham was on Fox News last night interviewing Majorie Cohn about the Supreme Court's habeas corpus ruling in Boumediene, and advocated that the President should simply ignore the ruling of the Court:

Marjorie, I was trying to think to myself, look, if I were President Bush, and I had heard that this case had come down, and I'm out of office in a few months. My ratings, my popularity ratings are pretty low, I would have said at this point, that's very interesting that the court decided this, but I'm not going to respect the decision of the court because my job is to keep this country safe.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. It's reached that point. What a fucking cesspool of authoritarian asshattery the right-wing has become. They think Supreme Court rulings shouldn't be respected. They think decisions from the highest court in the land are "interesting," but entirely voluntary. If you don't like what's decided, just ignore the ruling.

You know what kind of societies find their high court rulings merely "interesting" and advisory, don't you? Totalitarian dictatorships. Those are the societies whose governments use fear and rabid nationalism to retain control over their populace. And those are the same governments that respect views like this (h/t Firedoglake):

I have little to no patience with the 9/11 Troofers -- I've spent too much of my career debunking crazy-ass conspiracy theories not to consider them roughly the left-wing equivalents of the OKC and New World Order conspiracy theorists (and they have their strands of right-wing nuttery thrown in for good measure, like most of these folks) -- but earlier this week another right-wing nutcase -- radio talk-show host Michael Reagan -- went completely 'round the eliminationist bend in attacking them:

There is a group that's sending letters to our troops in Iraq ... claiming 9/11 was an inside job -- oh, yeah, yeah -- and that they should rethink why they're fighting. Who -- we ought to -- excuse me, folks, I'm going to say this: We ought to find the people who are doing this, take them out and shoot them.

Really. Just find the people who are sending those letters to our troops to demoralize our troops and do what they are doing, you take them out, they are traitors to our country, and shoot them. You have a problem with that, deal with it. But
anyone who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors -- that's what they are -- and you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet.

Yes, let's kill our traitors, Mikey. Great idea. I think your head would look brilliant on a silver platter myself, but that's not the kind of society we live in, you fucking dumbshit. Communitsts, fascists and insecure pricks with a hard-on for power and a .45 shoot people who disagree with them and have wacky ideas about what the government gets up to. Democratic societies just rely on the marketplace of ideas to ensure idiotic views are relegated to the bargain bin. They don't need bullets. You only need to start summarily executing dissidents when your ideas are too fucking weak to survive without firepower. Doesn't say much for the power of your ideas, does it, now, Mikey?

And lest you think it's just a couple of supreme-fucktards spouting outrageous bullshit like this, look at what's been featured in National Review lately(h/t Firedoglake):

One way that you can tell that Bill Buckley is really dead is that you would normally have to go visit the Ole Perfesser, instead of The National Review, to find something like this that mixes just the right amount of glib commentary with homicidal tendencies:

Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, shares this witty response to the Supreme Court's decision today:

An old government friend emails with a practical response to the Supreme Court:

"Let's free all Gitmo detainees...on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield. C-130 gunship circling overhead for security. Give them all a two minute running head start."

So it's practical to dump a bunch of political prisoners on a field and slaughter them with military aircraft, is it? Whatever happened to the firing squad? Or has our right wing gotten so cowardly that they can't even look a man in the eye before they pull the trigger?

This isn't a practical response. It's the kind of response I'd expect from someone in serious need of antipsychotics. It's exactly the kind of rhetoric I've read again and again in the forensic psychology texts, talking about the kind of people who used to be considered criminally insane and worth locking up. What does it say for the sanity of our conservatives that those sorts of views are now part of everyday right-wing political discourse?

If there are any sane conservatives left, I do wish you'd get these frothing fuckwits into straitjackets before they do any more harm.