Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

John Boehner's stupidity continues to impress:

Congressional Republicans have reportedly "taken issue with the large chunk of funding in the stimulus package -- some $300 billion all told -- that will go to shore up the budgets of states." Matt Yglesias notes how ridiculous this is.

I'm pretty impressed with John Boehner's ability to zero in like a laser on the least-defensible possible position.... In the serious-people universe, [assisting with state budgets] is the least controversial form of federal outlay. The idea is merely to prevent overall public spending from dropping too precipitously at a time when state budget cuts would have a contractionary impact. [...]

One of the privileges of opposition, of course, is that you don't really need to take responsibility for the consequences of your views. So if Boehner wants to take this line, nothing will really stop him or pull him back to planet earth. But it should be seen for what it is.

Abject stupidity. Indeed.

I suspect he believes he can get away with it because the media is so very impressed:

If you ever need an example of how the media swallows whole every right wing talking point, here it is. Norah O'Donnell uses John Boehner talking points about "contraception" to attack President Obama's stimulus plan as if it's the absolute truth. And of course everything else that republicans don't want in the bill is just plain old pork.

Norah: With all due respect isn't that a bunch of pork in here and how is that exactly stimulus?

I take your point Congressman. but go ahead and answer what Congressman Boehner said. How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives. How does that stimulate the economy?

Well, let me ask you that then, do you think 200 million dollars essentially contraceptives is wasteful spending?
You get my point, (scowl on her face) there is going to be since this is over 800 billion dollars there's going to be a lot in there that people are going to raise questions about in the long run about wasteful spending, whether it's democrats efforts just to HUGE massive, unprecedented spending bill to put stuff and get stuff paid for that they haven't been successful or paid for in the past.

She even used the now discredited talking point about the CBO. Now we have a real CBO report that says: CBO Report Confirms Economic Recovery Act Provides Immediate Stimulus to Help Create Jobs.

It didn't matter what answer Chris Van Hollen gave Norah, she wasn't buying it. Suddenly John Boehner is a source of incredibly non partisan information.

What did we do, empty the world's villages of their idiots to staff our national media? Check out how many times they've been citing a thoroughly debunked report:

Last Tuesday, the AP reported on a leaked Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “analysis” that had concluded that “it will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed” by President Barack Obama “will boost the economy.” Conservatives, such as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), quickly pounced on the story, claiming the CBO had proved that “government spending isn’t going to get our economy back on track.”

After the AP first wrote up the “report,” the rest of the media piled on the story. In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that since the AP’s report last Tuesday, the CBO report has been cited at least 81 times on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, the Sunday shows and the network newscasts in order raise questions about Obama’s recovery plan.

[snip]

As the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and the American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz reported last Friday, the CBO report being touted by conservatives and the media isn’t an actual report. “We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
It takes a special kind of idiocy to cite a non-existent report over eighty times. Political journalism in this country is dead.

And Faux News is threatening to break the mold on dumbfuckery:

Since President Obama’s announcement last week that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within one year, Fox News has done its best to frighten its viewers about the rule...

[snip]

Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) said last week that the U.S. could hold the detainees in federal prisons, just like we hold thousands of other dangerous inmates. This morning, Fox and Friends responded by sending a reporter to Murtha’s district to flash photos of suspected terrorists — their only identification being Muslim headgear — and ask residents, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?”
Strangely enough, they're not going to be living in our backyards, unless your actual back yard happens to contain a Supermax prison and you tend to have the inmates over for tea and cookies on a regular basis. Dumbasses. And yet, as Think Progress points out in that post, they somehow manage to get even more stupid:

Later in the segment, the Fox hosts repeated some of the right wing’s favorite myths about Guantanamo. They endorsed the “great idea” conservatives have been pushing of sending detainees to Alcatraz or a “haunted” prison in West Virginia:

CLAYTON MORRIS: We’ve got Alcatraz that exists. We give tours out there. Put them out on an island on Alcatraz, which is under our jurisdiction. What about Moundsville State Penitentiary? Someone from West Virginia wrote me and said it’s a haunted prison. It’s vacant.

In other words, Fox News and the right wing would prefer to send Guantanamo detainees to theme parks rather than to maximum-security federal prisons.

Ye fucking gods.

I need to go lie down with an icepack. The relentless dumbassery is giving me a migraine.