Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

It's official. The GOP is the aspiring American Taliban:

From time to time in recent years, liberals have identified the "Taliban wing" of the Republican Party -- those conservatives who reject church-state separation, taking marching orders from James Dobson, and wonder why the government doesn't do more to promote and endorse their vision of Christianity.

The phrase is generally considered offensive by most Republicans, and it's easy to understand why. Indeed, no U.S. political contingent wants to be compared to the Taliban.

It came as something of a surprise, then, to see a leading House Republican make the comparison unprompted.

[snip]

"Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban," Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. "And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- I'm not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that's not what we're saying. I'm saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with."

I see. So, a couple of weeks ago, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina compared the Republican Party to "freedom fighters" fighting against a "slide toward socialism." This week, a House GOP lawmaker and chairman of the NRCC compared the Republican Party to an insurgency.
We've gone from the Contra wing of the Republican Party to the Taliban wing of the Republican Party.

Asked to clarify, Sessions said he wasn't drawing a direct connection between the GOP and the Taliban. "I simply said one can see that there's a model out there for insurgency," Sessions explained.

He wants to model the GOP on the Taliban. And we're supposed to take these assclowns seriously? Give me a fucking break.

They're all fucking insane. Just get a load of the maverick hisownself, trying to show off the economic chops that (among other things) lost him the election:

Appearing on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show last night, McCain repeated his complaint that Obama’s stimulus plan wasn’t “putting us on a path to a balanced budget.” Later in the interview, he also argued that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies “exacerbated the Great Depression“:

MCCAIN: The job of the presidency, in my view, is to give people hope, give people hope. Whether you happen to have liked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies, and there’s a number of them I still think exacerbated the Great Depression, but he gave the fireside chats, and gave people hope and optimism for the future. I think that’s, there’s no problem that America can’t prevail over, because we’re still the greatest nation in the world.

It’s not surprising that McCain is pushing the false idea that Roosevelt’s New Deal worsened the Great Depression, which is a common conservative trope. It’s ironic, however, that he is coupling it with a call for including a balanced budget provision in the recovery package.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out in November, Roosevelt’s programs were working well until “he was persuaded to balance the budget” in 1937, so “he raised taxes and cut spending and the economy went back down again.”

You know what? I'd ask how much more stupid these fuckwits could be, but I'm really afraid the answer will be "exponentially." I don't think we've yet plumbed the depths of their idiocy:

One might hope that these displays of complete economic illiteracy were isolated cases. But last night the Senate considered an amendment to strip all the spending out of the stimulus bill and replace it with tax cuts, most of them permanent. (And 'spending' here includes direct transfers.) As Josh Marshall said:

"This approaches flat earth territory in terms of where the economy is right now and what conventional macroeconomics suggests about how to combat the problem."

How many Senate Republicans voted for this piece of idiocy? 36. How many voted against? Four.

At a time when the economy seems to be falling off a cliff, Republican politicians cannot come up with anything but the very same policies they have advocated year in, year out, in good times and bad -- and have enacted, with results that we can see around us. They show no signs of being interested in figuring out what will actually help the country, at least in any sense that involves canvassing the views of people outside their own echo chamber. They show no interest in any sort of compromise.

You really can't compromise with insane people, can you?

If this is the kind of schlock they're listening to, I suppose it's not surprising that they're having such difficulty understanding basic economic and political realities:

The ongoing train wreck that is Glenn Beck continued to pile up some impressive rubble yesterday when Beck kicked off his show with a segue directly from Barack Obama's signing the SCHIP legislation to a rant about socialism and communism:

Beck: Hey, has anybody noticed this crazy thing that we're on the road to socialism? I'm just sayin' -- wow, we got that SCHIPs thing goin' for us -- that's great, there's the change that we were all hoping for, seriously.

[snip]

Comrades! Good news from the Western Front! Our glorious revolution is starting to take hold. Oh, the revolution of Change. Our fearless leader has just signed in SCHIPs, and earlier today, he spoke out against capitalism. Listen up:

[Plays clip of Obama announcing cap on executive salaries for banks receiving bailout funds.]

Evidently, on Planet Beck, limiting the amount that corporate bailout recipients can take from taxpayers for their personal enrichment is "speaking out against capitalism."

Has anyone done a study to determine if Cons were all dropped repeatedly on their heads as children? Did they eat lead paint? Sniff too much rubber cement? There has to be something to explain why they're so egregiously insane.

And can someone expand the study to find out if this particular brand of insanity is contagious? Because it seems like the media's caught a terminal case of insanely stupid:

Yesterday, President Obama instituted a pay cap on bailed out businesses after it was revealed that Wall Street doled out an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses last year. “If the taxpayers are helping you, then you’ve got certain responsibilities to not be living high on the hog,” he explained.

In what appears to be an attempt to call Obama a hypocrite, ABC’s Scott Mayerowitz “reports” today that the President also has a “lavish lifestyle.” Under the title: “Obama’s Perks: Private Jet, Chef Tax-Free,” ABC notes that Obama earns $400,000 dollars a year and even has a private jet:

The president makes $400,000 a year, but hasn’t received a raise from Congress since 2001. He also gets a $50,000 annual entertainment expense account (any unused money at the end of the year must go back to the Treasury.)

Then there is the use of two private jets, Boeing 747s better known as Air Force One. And of course the constant security details, drivers, a private chef, a country vacation estate and the rent-free use of a well-known, 132-room mansion called the White House. The president also used to have a yacht, until Jimmy Carter sold it.

Comparing the President to Wall Street CEOs is absurd. The “private jet” that Obama uses is Air Force One, which is used as a security precaution and necessary for the dozens of staff and press that accompany the President on every trip. Each use of the jet by the President is regarded as a “classified military operation” in order to ensure the President’s safety.

Can these fuckwits seriously not tell the difference between a CEO and a head of state? OMFG.

If the country survives this onslaught of burning dumbfuckery, I'll have a heart attack from the shock.