Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

How the fuck can Cons face themselves in the mirror? Keep in mind that these were the same shitheads who lectured liberals endlessly on politics stopping at the water's edge, and howled that any Dem who spoke a disapproving word of the President in another country was a traitorous criminal, and screamed that the left hated America every time we said something mean about Bush.

You all remember those days. Keep all that in mind as you read the following.

Hannity and Rove:

Yesterday, President Obama delivered a speech at the U.N.’s climate change summit, saying the U.S. is “determined to act,” that “the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing,” and “the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.”

Last night on Fox News, host Sean Hannity and former Bush adviser Karl Rove predictably mocked Obama. It’s “his mandatory jab at America,” Hannity said. “I love the blame America first,” Rove piled on. The anti-Obama duo then moved into global warming denier territory...

Needless to say, everything they said afterward is completely debunked bullshit, and need not distract from the fact that these two assclowns see Obama putting America in a leadership position on combating climate change is somehow taking a jab at America. Even the most moonbat lunatic Bush haters were never quite this detached from reality.

But that's just the warm up. For the real hypocritical fuckery, we must turn to James Inhofe, a supposed Senator who's acting like a Faux News circus clown:

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) has announced to National Review that he will be personally leading a "truth squad" to the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference, where he will make it clear to international leaders not to believe that the United States will pass legislation to deal with the issue.

"Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in the United States Senate," said Inhofe. "Some people, like Senator Barbara Boxer, will tell the conference, with Waxman-Markey having passed in the House, that they can anticipate that some kind of bill will pass EPW."

It's nice to see how seriously foreign policy is taken these days -- when a member of the political minority will send his own delegation to an international conference, in order to undermine the government and tell other countries that they can't work with the United States.

That's so fucking beyond the pale it's unbelievable. Democrats should be screaming bloody murder - the Cons would've been if Dems had pulled anything like this on Bush. How the fuck is this country supposed to be governed with one civilized party and one band of absolute batshit insane dipshits? If Americans are stupid enough to vote Cons back into power, I think Atheist Chaplain's going to end up with a live-in handyman, because I'm not sure I could stand to be in the same country with these dumbfucks.

At least the folks in Hong Kong have some taste and intelligence, and despise having the latter insulted:

Sarah Palin made her international debut today in a closed-door speech at the CLSA Investors’ Forum in Hong Kong. AFP reports that Palin’s speech, which touched on issues like international terrorism and the U.S. debt, “divided” the audience and even prompted a few delegates to leave in disgust:

Former US vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin divided an international audience of financial big-hitters at her first speech outside North America on Wednesday with some leaving in disgust. [...]

Some listeners praised her forthright views on government social and economic intervention but others walked out early citing boredom or disgust. [...]

A US delegate leaving early with a colleague said: “it was awful, we couldn’t stand it any longer.”

I wonder if that was before or after Palin parroted debunked GOP talking points about cap-and-trade:

Three more Republican politicians have now used the heavily discredited and factually incorrect $1,761 figure as a per-family per-year price tag for cap and trade legislation, bringing the current total to 12.

• John Cornyn issued a press release saying "According to a the Department of Treasury's analysis, new taxes would be between $100 and $200 billion each year, costing families up to 1,761 each year." Unlike some of the others, Cornyn didn't even try to hide his source. He linked directly to the conservative blogger who came up with the $1,761 figure. He attributes the figure to the Treasury Department -- which is false.
• According to user casinclair on Twitter, Sarah Palin repeated the lie at her speech in Hong Kong yesterday. I'm assuming this is paraphrased, and am trying to find a full transcript: "Cap and tax (trade) will cause unemployment. Say it will cost $1800 per Americans and cause no change." [emphasis added]
  
• Republican Senate Candidate Scott Brown said yesterday: "They want a "yes" vote on cap and trade, even if it will raise energy costs on the average family in this country by $1,761 a year."

Headache now.

When they're not lying about global warming and cap-and-trade, Cons are happy to lie about same-sex marriage:

In April, when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down a state law defining marriage as solely between a man and a woman, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) called it an “unconstitutional” decision and predicted that it could lead to Iowa becoming “the gay marriage Mecca.” On WorldNetDaily’s radio show today, King was asked what the “impact” of the decision has been on Iowa. He replied by saying that his prediction is becoming true...

[snip]

Earlier this week, the Des Moines Register released a poll showing that “Iowans are almost evenly divided about whether they would vote for or against a constitutional amendment to end marriage for same-sex couples.” It also found that “the overwhelming majority of Iowans – 92 percent – say gay marriage has brought no real change to their lives.” Asked about the poll, King complained that many Iowans do not have “a very good understanding of what same-sex marriage does to the overall institution of marriage.” After claiming that “Rick Santorum was right” when he said that expanding gay rights would lead to a “right to incest,” King asserted that same-sex marriage is “a purely socialist concept”:

KING: But if, there also would be no rational argument against group marriage. And I just take this along the rationale even further and would say if relationships between individuals cannot be prohibited by the state legislature then there is no ban that can actually be constitutional that would ban group marriage. And it wouldn’t have to be for reasons of, let me say, love or lust. It could be reasons of profitability or avoiding taxes or accessing benefits.

So in the end this is something that has to come with a, if there’s a push for a socialist society, a society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together, living collectively off of one pot of resources earned by everyone. That is, this is one of the goals they have to go to is same-sex marriage because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation. They want access to public funds and resources. Eventually all those resources will be pooled because that’s the direction we’re going. And not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.

So, he insults 92% of his constituents, and then tops it off by babbling about socialism while demonstrating he has no fucking idea what socialism actually is. One thing it's not: a big gay plot to rope all of us into communal marriages. What a motherfucking dumbass.

If you wonder how bad the Con party's become, consider the fact that Boehner and Cantor now want us to believe that they lurv themselves some Michele Bachman:

Last week, Politico reported that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) were worried about “the possible damage inflicted on the party’s reputation by bomb-throwing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).” Bachmann, of course, has called for McCarthyite investigations into fellow lawmakers and encouraged conservatives to “slit” their “wrists” to oppose health care reform. However, conservative blogger Andy Aplikowski received a letter from Boehner and Cantor in which they denied the Politico report, asserting their full support for Bachmann:

We wanted to respond to your letter to us last week and to assure you that regardless of what inside-the-beltway media writes or what unnamed “sources” it quotes, we are proud to serve with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. [...]

But not proud enough to keep that letter prominently displayed on Boehner's website, apparently. Upshot: they want the batshit crazy base to know they fully support batshit crazy Bachmann, but they're apparently hoping to conceal that support from non-batshit crazy Americans. Sad.

And then we have the NRCC taking pages from the creationist quotemining manual:

Politico reporter Glenn Thrush has an extraordinary post up that essentially calls out the National Republican Congressional Committee for sending him a deeply misleading, sliced-and-diced trascript of supposedly incendiary remarks about race and the town halls made by a Democrat.

Bear with me on this one, because it’s interesting. Thrush says that a few days ago, an NRCC spokesman sent him a transcript of some comments by Dem Rep. Tom Perreillo, in which he said he’d witnessed “very racist remarks” at town halls. Thrush ran the NRCC version of the transcript, and the Perriello comments have since gone viral on the right.

Turns out, though, that the transcript the NRCC sent had cut a bunch of words out of what Perriello actually said, relacing them with ellipses, in a way that made his comments seem much worse than they were, Thrush says. Here’s the updated transcript, with the words the NRCC spokesman cut out in bold:

“I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in central and southern Virginia [and the vast majority of them were civil; people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds]. And there were [rare] cases where very racist remarks were made. Sometimes they were called out by neighbors in the audience; sometimes they weren’t. Clearly, race remains a factor in America, [but] there’s also a lot of disagreement here that is genuine and not based on race, so I think we have to have both conversations.”

Thrush (full disclosure: He’s a friend of mine) doesn’t blame the NRCC spokesman, saying that he’s a “partisan operative,” and took responsibility for what happened himself. Kudos to Thrush for that, but I think he’s being too kind to the NRCC, which induldged in some seriously dishonest cherry-picking here on a highly incendiary topic.

Any day now, we'll have Michael Steele coming out with the Cons' version of the infamous banana video.

And one of the right's most prominent voices, Glenn Beck, is more of an asshole than you think:

I wonder which of Beck's "9 Principles, 12 Values" this would fall under.

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

If you think he's changed since his Y95 days, you've not been paying attention.

And, for bonus fuckery, check out his take on the 14th Amendment (h/t).

Too many of my fellow Americans take these outrageous assclowns seriously. It doesn't speak well of us at all.