Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Breaking news from Carpetbagger: "We don’t know the motive, but we do know the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party was shot in his office today, and is in a Little Rock hospital in critical condition." Both Chairman Bill Gwatney and his attacker are dead. No word yet on motive - I'll follow this up later tonight if there's any update.

In other news, there's confusion in the Republicon ranks about how exactly Obama should be branded. On the one hand, he's "in lockstep" with Bush:

We talked earlier about the Obama campaign’s new TV ad, which notes, among other things, the fact that John McCain voted with George W. Bush 95% of the time last year. Soon after, the McCain campaign responded by — I kid you not — telling reporters, “In the Senate, Barack Obama has voted in lockstep with President George W. Bush nearly half the time.”

... which implies he's a lot more conservative than you might think. I mean, heck, nearly half the time! That makes him practically almost as much of a Bush clone as McCain, right?

BUT he's like a frothing radical leftie commie bastard, too:

Jerome Corsi helped destroy John Kerry in 2004 with a hatchet-job, “Unfit for Command,” that became the basis for the entire Swiftboat smear. It worked once, so Corsi’s giving it another shot.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up “extensive connections to Islam” — Mr. Obama is Christian — and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

Wow, total conservative AND total radical liberal. That Obama sure is a complex character, innit he?

Methinks the Republicons are having reality issues. Again. Still.

Speaking of confused, Bush doesn't seem to understand how ridiculous it is for pots to call kettles black:

Yesterday, after meeting with an oil industry front group, President Bush rebuked the congressional leadership for taking a “vacation” without holding a vote on offshore oil drilling:

Last month I acted and I lifted an executive branch restriction on offshore oil exploration. And then I called on Congress to join me and…end the legislative ban. Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership in Congress decided to go on a five-week vacation, a recess, rather than act on behalf of the American consumer.

Bush’s dig at Congress for being on vacation is ironic, as he rivals Ronald Reagan for the title of “presidential vacation-time record holder.”

A title he's determined to hold on to:

Today, Dana Perino announced that after a “day or two” delay because of the war, Bush will spend two weeks at his ranch in Crawford, TX...

Well, at least he delayed his vacation by a few hours. Condi wouldn't even come back from hers.

What could be worse than a group of utter chuckleheads running this country like an episode of Keystone Kops? So glad you asked:

Despite McCain’s standard disclaimer in his press conference today that “now is not the time for partisanship,” it’s very clear that, reminiscent of the way that the Bush administration has wielded U.S. national security policy as a political weapon in a permanent negative campaign, John McCain intends to politicize and personalize the Russia-Georgia conflict as much as he can. His campaign has been relentlessly touting McCain’s personal relationship with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili — this story has McCain foreign policy adviser and former Georgia lobbyist Randy Scheunemann claiming that McCain and the Georgian president are “speaking daily throughout the crisis” — raising the very serious question of whether McCain’s bonehead straight talk is further inflaming an already tense crisis.

Hoo boy. It's gonna be a loooong four years if this fuckwit gets elected - unless, of course, he makes them very short indeed by finishing the demolishing of America early in his term.