Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

The word o' the day is ludicrous. Or we could just go for plain speech and say "fucking stupid bullshit." You pick:

How stupid has the flag-pin nonsense become? Karl Rove told a national television audience that Barack Obama’s argument is that, “If you wear a flag lapel pin, you’re not a true patriot.” He did not appear to be kidding.

[snip]

When O’Reilly is defending Obama against shameless hackery, you know Rove has gone over the edge.

No kidding. I'm headed outside to see if there's anybody on a pale horse lurking around.

In other news, in case you were wondering how far the Bush Administration would go to lie to you, the New York Times has an answer:

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have
been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

Isn't that rich? The Administration says, "Lie to the American public or we won't talk to you anymore." The analysts squeal, "No, please! Not that! I'll say anything, just don't hate me!"

Let me just ask one little question here: what the fuck good is it for people to have access if all they can do with it is lie? They're supposed to be analysts, for fuck's sake. The second you stop analyzing and start lying, you're no longer an analyst, you're a mouthpiece. You're a sock puppet. You're a worthless piece of shit. Are we clear?

Good. Now, let's go over something else about analysis:

The New York Times today examines John McCain's very Bush-like propensity to run around slapping the "Al Qaeda" label on everyone we're fighting in Iraq, even though . . . it's completely false to describe them that way. The article, needless to say, asks war cheerleader and Extremely Serious Middle East Expert Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution what he thinks about that and he replies with one of the most striking statements in a while:

Some other analysts do not object to Mr. McCain's portraying the insurgency (or multiple insurgencies) in Iraq as that of Al Qaeda. They say he is using a "perfectly reasonable catchall phrase" that, although it may be out of place in an academic setting, is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that "does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing," said Kenneth M. Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy
at the Brookings Institution. [emphasis in original]

You're analysts. Your job is to analyze, not make excuses for brain-dead candidates who can't tell the difference between a Sunni, a Shi'a, and his own left buttcheek. Calling everybody "al Qaeda" is not "a perfectly reasonable catchall phrase." It's lying. Didn't we just discuss this?

I'm sorry. I must have been drinking too much. I left out part of the word o' the day. It's actually, "Ludicrous Buffoon."

Argh.