Dumbfuckery du Jour

Ye gods, wot a day.  There's about ten thousand news items all clamoring for attention at once.  We are, in fact, drowning in dumbfuckery.  And to top that off, it seems everybody in the nation had a broken cell phone, so I merely had time to skim rather than wade into the depths.  In retrospect, this might have been for the best.

Well, let's start from the shallow yet disgusting end and get our feet acclimated before we wade any deeper.  We can begin with the Cons' continuing battle against the unemployed.  With an extension to unemployment benefits a foregone conclusion, Cons decided desperate families could wait another thirty hours while they played their little obstruction games in the Senate.  Rep. Alan Grayson analyzes their thinking:

On the floor of the House, Grayson soundly berated the Republicans for holding up the extension of unemployment benefits with a "May God have mercy on your souls".

Noting that his grandfather scoured the garbage dump for things he could sell to support his family in the 1930s, Grayson said, “That is the America the Republicans are trying to revive — the America of desperate straits and cheap labor.”

“I know what [Republicans] are th/inking [sic]: ‘Why don’t they just sell some stock? If they’re in really dire straits, maybe they could take some of their art collection and send it off to the auctioneer. And if they’re in deep, deep trouble, maybe the unemployed can sell one of their yachts.’ That’s what the Republicans are thinking,” Grayson said.

The Party of Marie Antoinette, they are.  Despicable little bastards.  (And yes, I know, a Dem or two is lumped in with that category - I'm looking at you, Ben Nelson.)

Now that we've endured some group sociopathy, let's wade further and observe a pure psychopath in action:

We got a better sense of Breitbart's perspective today when the right-wing media activist told MSNBC, "I feel bad that they made this about her, and I feel sorry that they made this about her. Watching how they've misconstrued, how the media has misconstrued the intention behind this, I do feel a sympathy for her plight." He added that he's "sympathetic" to the fact that the media "went after her and not after the NAACP."

So, in Breitbart's mind, the media is to blame -- apparently because news outlets ran with the story that Breitbart gave them.

David Kurtz calls the remarks "almost sociopathic." Simon Maloy labels Breitbart's response "pathological."

Why, indeed.  Y'see, a psychopath never sees himself at fault.  Someone else is always to blame.

For further psychopathy, see also Mitch McConnell, the idiot who wanted to start a revolution by shooting the ACLU and the Tides Foundation, and our national media.  Oh, fuck it, throw in very nearly the entirety of the right wing while we're at it.

We're pretty deep in the brown, sticky and stinky.  Time to wade back to shore, passing the RNC on the way, who're hip-deep in the deep shit and getting deeper:

It's clearly a busy media day, with a variety of stories generating plenty of discussion, but the RNC's hidden-debt controversy is probably under-appreciated at this point. It has the potential to be a very big deal.

A GOP civil war has broken out between RNC Chairman Michael Steele and RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen.

The dust-up reveals new levels of dysfunction at the RNC and suggests the Republican National Committee is having real money problems.

In a memo obtained by ABC News, Pullen makes startling allegations against Steele's chief of staff, accusing him of trying to hide unpaid invoices and causing the RNC not to report more than $7 million in debt in its April and May filings with the Federal Election Commission.

Now, we know that at least some of what Pullen is charging is already true -- the RNC had to file amended reports to explain previously unreported debt. But according to the RNC's own treasurer, Steele and others at party headquarters did this deliberately, allegedly going to literally criminal lengths to hide party debts and financial troubles.

How criminal?  Just ask criminal mastermind Hans von Spakovsky:

Though RNC aides and officials are strongly denying any wrongdoing or misreporting, the organization has brought on “former [FEC] Chairman Michael E. Toner” as outside counsel, an “unusual and significant move,” according to Heritage Foundation legal pundit Hans A. von Spakovsky. He noted, “The RNC normally uses its own inside counsel to deal with the FEC, but if I had a really serious problem with the FEC, Michael Toner is one of the first guys I would turn to help me out.” 

Somebody needs to pop us up a container ship's worth of popcorn while somebody else holds us some ringside seats.  This looks set to get fascinating.

But first, if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to go hose off after that dip with the dipshits.  I feel icky.