Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Once again, I am reduced to typing Happy Hour in a dreadfully awkward position due to the fact that my feline believes cats, not laptops, belong in laps. I shall have to get a remote-controlled mousie as a diversion.

We shall do our best.

Circus acts generally begin with clowns, right? Since the Con party has become a total three-ring circus, let us start with an assclown:

Glenn Beck wanted to use the senators' opening remarks at the Sonia Sotomayor hearings yesterday on his Fox News show to illustrate his claim that President Obama is shoving his agenda down America's throats, blah blah blah.

So he ran a pastiche of various warm remarks offered mostly by Democrats on the first day of the hearings, describing them thus:

Beck: America, I want you to watch this. As our country burns to the ground, because we all have this kind of stuff going on, this is the questioning -- now get ready, because it's a hard line of questioning -- here's what happened, this is what our senators were doing today. Watch this.

What he proceeded to show, of course, was senators making prefatory remarks to the nominee.

Because as anyone who glanced at the Judiciary Committee schedule for these hearings would know, the actual questioning was not scheduled to begin until today.

Details, schmetails. It's Faux News - they can't be expected to understand the difference between opening remarks and actual questions. As for glancing at a schedule, now, pfft. That kind of hard journalistic research is for sissies.

Besides, didn't you hear? Journalism is dead:

Chyron on Sean Hannity's Fox News program last night: "Journalism is dead." Irony, however, is not.

No, indeed. In fact, the Irony King just rode again today:

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the secret CIA program that Vice President Cheney allegedly ordered hidden from Congressional oversight involved plans to kill or capture al-Qaeda operatives. Last night on Fox News, top Bush adviser Karl Rove refused to comment when asked by host Bill O’Reilly if he knew anything about the program. “I want to limit my comments to what I’ve read in the newspapers and observations,” he said. Rove then appeared to make the argument that executive branch should not inform Congress of what it is doing:

ROVE: Look, it’s interesting. The CIA briefed Congress to this, I guess, in June. And the Congress immediately leaks it. That, itself is, a violation, I think, of several statutes and indicative of why it is so dangerous to give Congress information.

Oh, yes. That Congress, buncha damned dirty leakers, whereas the Irony King and his buddies in the executive branch never, ever leaked like sieves, nossir:

After all, while working in the White House, Karl Rove himself leaked classified national security information, helping to damage the career of a covert CIA agent. Moreover, the secret program that has been reported in the press in recent days (purportedly a targeted assassination program) was leaked to the Wall Street Journal by “two former intelligence officials familiar with the matter” in its report — not Congress.

Love that inconvenient fact there at the end that Karl just kinda skated right over. Those right wing fucktards, they do love to ignore them some reality, don't they?

They also love to put words in other peoples' mouths, with sometimes hilarious results:

This week is Sen. Jeff Sessions' (R-Ala.) first chance to appear in the national spotlight in quite a long while. It doesn't seem to be going well.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor's judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 "wise Latina" speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who "believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices."

"So I would just say to you, I believe in Judge Cedarbaum's formulation," Sessions told Sotomayor.

"My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here," Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions's apparent surprise. "We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts."

In fact, while Sessions held up Cedarbaum, a Reagan nominee, as having the superior approach to jurisprudence, Cedarbaum immediately backed Sotomayor. "I don't believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no affect on her approach to judging," she told the Wall Street Journal this morning.

Remember: this is the man the Cons in the Senate chose for a leadership position. Sad, innit?

And this is the man chosen to lead the RNC:

Poor Michael Steele. Every time the Republican National Committee chair seems to be making some progress, he goes and screws it up.

Take last weekend's conference of the Young Republican National Foundation, at which the group elected as its head a woman who'd recently been caught endorsing racist statements made on her Facebook page. Asked by one attendee, who appeared to be a minority, how he intends to bring "diverse populations" into the Republican Party, Steele offered a plan that probably shouldn't inspire a lot of confidence from the GOP: "My plan is to say, 'Y'all come. Cause a lot of you are already here."

Really? Where?

And how's that minority outreach going, anyway?

Yesterday, ThinkProgress, picking up a post by the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel, noted an offensive Facebook message by Young America’s Foundation spokesman Jason Mattera, in which he said, “If Sotomayor gained life experience from The Ghetto, does that mean she’d have a tendency to shank Scalia?” Mattera responded to “the silly outrage from liberals” today in a message to Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey:

Okay, guys. Sorry. I got it all wrong: Sotomayor will not “shank” Scalia on the bench. What I meant to say is that she’ll shoot him up in a drive-by. Watch out, brother Antonin!

Second salvo launched! Your turn, Sonia.

Mattera, who grew up in Brooklyn, claimed that his posting was part of a joking “inner-city rivalry” with the Bronx-born Sotomayor.

Oh, yes. Just joking. It's not their fault that minorites don't appreciate racist jokes, right?

Let us leave the GOP wondering why minorites don't like their little jokes, and turn now to savor their cowardice:

If you believe the Politico, Republicans are very, very psyched about the media’s heavy focus on that secret Cheney-authorized program that the CIA concealed from Congress, because it’s really bad politically for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.

Republicans claim that House Dems who are mulling an investigation into the secret CIA program, like Intel committee chair Silvestre Reyes, are helping the GOP paint Pelosi and Dems as weak on terror. As a spokesman for GOP leader John Boehner put it: “The speaker’s liberal allies are keeping her accusations against the CIA front and center.”

This raises the question: If keeping these allegations in the news is so good for Republicans, why don’t they want a probe of the program?

If the House did launch an investigation into the CIA’s secret program, of course, the media attention to this story would ratchet up exponentially. Yet Republicans mysteriously don’t support any such efforts.

Couldn't possibly be because actual details would be so much more damaging to them than the Dems, now, could it?