Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Obama's second full day in office endures a tsunami of stupid. Where to begin? I'm spoiled for choice.

Look like I could've held my breath on the right-wing freakout over Obama's oath after all - I wouldn't have had to hold it for long:

Just when it seemed we could finally move from complaints about Barack Obama's oath of office, the right finds something new to whine about.

When Obama took the oath on Tuesday, he used the same Bible that Lincoln used in 1861. When he followed up with another oath last night, he raised his right hand, but kept his left hand by his side. This, apparently, is making some people unhappy.

The lead story on Drudge right now reports, in all caps, "No Bible Used At Obama Re-Swear."

Obama urged the nation to put an "end to the petty grievances" on Tuesday, but it appears some haven't quite gotten the message.

These people are just astoundingly inane. I can see I'm going to have to buy a new thesaurus, one with plenty of synonyms for "abject, batshit-insane, pathetic, outrageous stupidity." It's not just that they're freaking out because Obama didn't have his hand on a Bible when he swore the second time. It's the fact that people like Glenn Beck are claiming that this has never ever happened before in the whole history of the country. Au contraire, my research-challenged fucktards.

And the stupid certainly isn't limited to right-wing noise machine blowhards. It's neck-deep in the halls of Congress:

Earlier today, President Obama signed an executive order directing the closure of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo. Asked during a news conference for his reaction to the order, House Minority Leader John Boehner made it clear that he wasn’t even sure why anyone would want to close the prison in the first place. After all, he explained, the detainees there get “more comforts than a lot of Americans get”:

QUESTION: A lot of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle say that Guantanamo Bay has just given the United States a black eye on the world stage. Isn’t that part of the problem, too? […]

BOEHNER: I don’t know that there’s a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo. It is — we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get.

Tell you what, John. Next vacation, why don't you spend it in Gitmo? Here's some of the luxuries awaiting you:

“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators,” said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani’s interrogation records and other military documents. … Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.

The Post also reported that al-Qahtani’s treatment was so extreme he had to be hospitalized twice and at one point his heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute. In 2007, an FBI report found that detainees “were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves.” Similarly, in 2004, the Red Cross reported “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment which was approaching “torture.”

Sounds like a veritible luxury resort, doesn't it just? Makes you wonder why detainees demanded habeas corpus rights - I mean, who'd ever want to leave such a ritzy place?

As far as group-level stupid goes, the Republicon strategy of obstructing for the sake of obstruction is well underway:

Congressional Republicans forced a brief but unnecessary delay on Hillary Clinton's nomination, and have forced additional delays on the confirmation of the next Attorney General and Treasury Secretary. Today we learned that another conservative Republican senator is standing in the way of EPA nominee Lisa Jackson and Council on Environmental Quality nominee Nancy Sutley.

David Kurtz wonders what the Republicans are thinking.

Think about it for a minute. This is the Republican Party circa 2009: pro-torture and pro-global warming. This is what they're staking their claims on. And willing to obstruct a wildly popular new President in the midst of not just a national economic crisis, but a convergence of international crises of which economic collapse is just one.

That is, of course, true. Congressional Republicans don't really have a strategy in mind -- they know these confirmations are going to go through anyway -- but they're flailing around, demonstrating little more than their ability to be nuisances.

A herd of screaming infants. That's what they remind me of. These fuckwits should be sent to daycare until they learn to play well with others.

You can learn a lot about people from what they're inspired by. In the case of one contender for the RNC chair, it turns out that his political career was inspired by the civil rights movement:

In the race for the RNC chair, it's becoming difficult to figure out which candidate is the most problematic in terms of party outreach to minority voters and adjusting to the political realities or our times.

The Politico reports that South Carolina GOP chairman Katon Dawson has publicly traced his political coming of age to the civil rights movement -- that is, opposition to 1960's busing policies. "Government reached into my life and grabbed me and shook me at the age of 15," Dawson told a University of South Carolina audience in 2003.

This is the same idiot who belonged to a whites-only country club until he realized that might hurt his chances at political advancement. Interesting people they have in the running for control over the RNC. Makes you wonder if they've decided they never want to win an election ever again.

What else can you expect of delusional fuckwits?

On his radio show this morning, conservative talker Bill Bennett hosted the most prominent global warming denier in Congress, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Opening up the conversation on the subject, Bennett declared, “I think you’ve prevailed on this.”
“I really believe it,” replied Inhofe, claiming that his opponents “won’t say global warming any more, they’re trying to say climate change.” He added that he thinks former Vice President Al Gore is “getting nervous” because, he claimed, “the science is totally changed.” Inhofe then claimed that more scientists are skeptical of climate change than those who believe in it:

INHOFE: So the science, the science is totally changed. It was the IPCC, those Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the United Nations. But keep in mind, the only report you get from them is their summary for policy docs. And those are not scientists. There’s only 52 scientists that signed on to those, to that, as opposed to what? Some 650 who now have rebuked that.

I wonder if he sees sparkly ponies when he looks out his window. That must be what's blinding him to the fact that his list is bogus, and this week's survey of 3,146 scientists finds 90% of them have, in fact, not rebuked global warming in the least.

The Cons have a long way to go before they start looking like anything more than a pathetic farce.