Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Apparently, everyone went comatose just like I did today. The stupid's a little thin on the ground, but there's a definite film there, much like the thin film of oil that coats Phoenix streets and waits for the rare rainstorm in order to fuck up motorists' lives.

It's coating the pages of the Weekly Standard like a septic tank malfunction:

I'll give the Weekly Standard credit for clarity. The conservative magazine published two very similar pieces today -- one from Stephen Hayes and William Kristol, the other from Fred Barnes -- offering the identical attack with indistinguishable language: they want President Obama to do more to intervene in Iran.

The pieces are almost comical in their belligerence towards the White House. Hayes and Kristol lament Obama's "weakness," and described the U.S. president as "a de facto ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei." Barnes insists, "Obama has tilted in favor of the regime. The result is personal shame (for Obama) and policy shame (for the United States)."

What I find interesting about the 2,000 words of the conservatives' angry and righteous denigration is how remarkably narrow it is. For Hayes, Kristol, and Barnes, it's almost as if the argument presented by the president is so self-evidently horrible, they don't feel the need to explain why they think it's wrong.

The same shenanigans went on in the WaPo's op-ed pages, with the same abject refusal to so much as mention the President's position, let alone attempt a rebuttal.

I have a different take than Steve's. I believe they refuse to address the President's argument because they know he's right. You know who else knows he's right?

Gary Sick, a former National Security Council expert on Iran in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations -- not, in other words, a liberal activist or party hack -- explained the other day, "The Obama administration has handled this pretty well. There's nothing we can do in a proactive way that is going to improve things. We could make things a lot worse."

It's a position endorsed by other Republicans such as Dick Lugar and Henry Kissinger. Nick Burns, an Undersecretary of State in the Bush administration, said this week that Ahmadinejad "would like nothing better than to see aggressive statements, a series of statements, from the United States which try to put the U.S. at the center of this."

It's just a little hard for merry assclowns like Kristol et al to come up with a credible argument against the President's position when even the foreign policy experts on their side are saying, "Obama's doin it rite." So they go with the arguments that lack all credibility, and hope that enough belligerant bleating will blind people to the fact they're utterly full of shit.

Turning to the wide world o' finance, and the assclowns who pretend to report on it, check out this quote from CNBC's Larry Kudlow:

Last night on CNBC, ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Faiz Shakir debated CNBC host Larry Kudlow about a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal which revealed that the CEOs of banks receiving government bailout money are expensing travel on private jets for personal vacations. “I think it’s great because I want to stimulate the economy,” Kudlow said of taxpayer-funded private jet trips by bank CEOs. “I want to help the resorts. … I’m glad the CEOs are going around. I just wish they’d take me with them.”

This, my darlings, from the same network that so enjoyed broadcasting Rick Santelli's rant against struggling homeowners. When ordinary people accept government money for personal expenses, they're losers. When CEOs do it, they're "stimulating the economy." Natch.

All this talk of media assclowns and hypocrisy reminds me of someone...

Remember how, a week or so ago, Bill O'Reilly was preoccupied with the idea that the news media had comparatively obsessed over the domestic-terrorism killing of Dr. George Tiller, while "ignoring" the killing of Private Long, a similar act of terrorism? He had numerous segments complaining that the matter proved there was a liberal media bias.

At one point, he complained that CNN had "ignored" the story -- a completely meritless charge. At another, he even claimed that the only place you could find any coverage of the case was on Fox.

Now, compare that to how Fox has handled yet another horrifying case of murderous extremism: the arrest of Shawna Forde and her Minuteman cohorts for the cold-blooded murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father.

Fox simply has ignored the story. There is a single Associated Press story on the Fox website. This AP piece, notably, contains not a single reference to Forde's long history with the Minuteman movement, her close ties to Jim Gilchrist, or the fact that she intended this Minutemen squad to use its ill-gotten gains to "start a revolution against the United States government."

When it comes to ignoring right-wing extremism, Bill O's first in line. When it comes to hypocrisy - well, let's just say that those people who camp for days for the new iPhone and Star Wars are late risers compared to Bill jumping in the hypocrisy queue.

Finally, let us end with a video that sums up the entire Con argument against health care reform:

At least the Cons inspire creative people to come up with some seriously funny shit mocking them. It's about all they're good for these days...