Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

There's plenty of stupid needs a good kickin', but we've just got to start with this gem.  You remember that utterly ridiculous website the RNC launched?  If not, go refresh your memory.  Let the burning stupid warm you.  Then contemplate how much the idiots spent:

Guess how much the Republican National Committee's silly new website cost. A whopping $1.4 million -- five times more the DNC's redesigned site. I'm afraid the RNC didn't get its money's worth.

Understatement of the year. 

And here's another absolute gem.  It appears the Cons' inability to recognize satire is a chronic condition:

Conservative activist Hugh Hewitt published an item over the weekend from Lee Habeeb, which I'm fairly certain was intended to be a joke. The piece ran on Saturday, Oct. 24, and pointed to an event that "occurred" on Wednesday, Oct. 28. (via Karen Tumulty)

More bad news for Fox News ..... sort of.

Oct. 28, 2009 12:43 PM. This just in from Speaker of the House Pelosi. In an interview with MSNBC's Keith Olberman [sic] last night, Nancy Pelosi announced that she would move to bring a vote to the floor of The House of Representatives as early as next week to ban Fox from covering Congress. "That Fox regularly grants access to Republican Congressman to spread their lies and propaganda on their airwaves is a violation of the public trust, and their continued desire to challenge such well documented facts as Global Warming, and the efficacy of single payer health insurance, proves that they are simply doing the work of the special interests. They should thus be stripped of their journalistic access in the halls of Congress," argued Pelosi.

As Tumulty noted, the first clue that an item might be satire is "when it mentions dates that are in the future."

And yet, you might be surprised at the number of blogs that ran with this as a legitimate story. Then again, if you're familiar with far-right blogs, maybe you wouldn't be surprised.

Having a heart attack from not surprised, in fact.  How much more pathetic can they get?  I'm actually kind of afraid to ask.  But I do think we should ask them if they know that the word "gullible"isn't in the dictionary.

It's official now: Beck, Limbaugh and Palin are the leaders of the Con party.  The Weekly Standard sez so:

Reflecting the emerging stranglehold over the Republican Party that Limbaugh and Beck now exert, the new cover of The Weekly Standard identifies Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin as the faces of the GOP (see image to the right). Yesterday morning on C-Span, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich expressed concern with the cover:

Well, I just think it’s interesting that two of the three people on the cover are talk radio hosts — Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. And they’re fine people, and they have big audiences, and that’s terrific. But you have a party that has Gov. Haley Barbour, it has Gov. Mitch Daniels, it has Gov. Tim Pawlenty. [...] You know, you can have a very, very intense movement of 20 percent. You can’t govern. To govern, you got to get 50 percent plus one after the recount.

Isn't it cute when Newtie briefly contacts reality?  How much would you like to bet the reality-challenged rest of his party don't follow suit?

Reality-challenged as they are, Cons must be a wee bit nervous about their chances, though.  They're actually trying to play at being capable of governing, and to prove it, they're ripping a page from the Democratic play book:

One of the more common criticisms of congressional Republicans is that they have no real policy agenda and offer nothing in the way of constructive ideas. The criticism reinforces the notion that the GOP is the "party of no," and it has the added benefit of being true.

CQ's Alan Ota reports today that the House Republican caucus, hoping to nationalize next year's midterm elections, is putting together a platform of sorts, which has been "informally dubbed 'Ten for '10 '." It's intended to mirror the style of the Democrats' "Six for '06" platform.

While GOP leaders would not discuss the specifics of the emerging agenda, they said it will make the case that Republicans are better suited to revive the nation's economy. [...]

Tom Price of Georgia, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, said members of the conference are coming up with recommended policy planks that would provide voters "a commitment to accomplish certain ends."

Among proposals floated so far by members: a ban on spending unused funds from this year's economic stimulus law (PL 111-5), tougher earmark disclosure requirements and an "all of the above" climate change plan that would expand offshore oil drilling.

It's hard to be too critical of the ideas thus far; they're only proposals that have been "floated," and there will apparently be 10 measures, not three.

But at this point, I think "Ten for '10" may not be such a great idea. Two of three ideas that are apparently on the table are just holdovers from the McCain campaign. The third, scrapping the economic recovery package, may have some political juice -- most of the public probably doesn't realize the stimulus' role in prevent a wholesale economic collapse -- but it only offers Democrats another opportunity to remind voters that the recovery package was only necessary because Republican policies help bring the global economy to its knees.

You know, I can't even begin to state how pathetic this all is.  They can't come up with their own ideas, so they copy the Dems' strategy, then shoehorn old ideas that lost them the election into someone else's format - it's just sad.

But they do have an interesting campaign strategy in the battle for New York's 23rd:

In a press release sent out by the Dede Scozzafava campaign, the moderate Republican running in the three-way special election, several GOP state legislators call upon Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman to drop out of the race -- and declare that a new poll from the pro-Hoffman Club For Growth showing him ahead is false:

"Doug Hoffman must do the right thing and drop out of this race right now," said Assemblywoman Janet Duprey. "This is a campaign for Congress -- not an audition to be a talking head on a cable news program. Doug Hoffman doesn't live here, he doesn't understand our local issues and, regardless of his campaign's theatrics and false polls, he knows he is completely unelectable. Make no mistake about it -- Doug Hoffman is a spoiler, and by staying in this race he will jeopardize a seat the Republican Party has held here since the Civil War. It's high time that Hoffman puts the good of this community over his personal ambition and endorses our Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava," she concluded.

So, lemme get this straight: Cons think that asking the guy who's got Palin on his side, who's a darling of the Teabaggers, and who is currently winning the rabid right, is just going to shuffle aside for the moderate Con just cuz?  Give me a fucking break.  Loo-sers.

Not to mention obstructionist fucktards:

In the Clinton era, Senate Republicans blocked a lot of the White House's judicial nominations. In the Bush era, Senate Democrats blocked votes on some would-be judges, too. But as Doug Kendall explains today, we've never seen anything quite like the new levels of Republican obstructionism.

It seems clear that Senate Republicans are prepared to take the partisan war over the courts into uncharted territory -- delaying up-or-down votes on the Senate floor for even the most qualified and uncontroversial of the president's judicial nominees.... Over the past several decades, senators in both parties have used an escalating set of procedural tactics to block confirmations, particularly near the end of an out-going president's term in office. To date, however, the tit-for-tat game has played out within a fairly narrow category of nominees who are deemed controversial. While there has never been an agreed-upon definition of what that means -- it's an eye-of-the-beholder type of thing -- there has consistently been a large category of nominees that are not considered controversial.

Despite all this, Senate Republicans still won't give Obama's judges a vote. The three Obama judges confirmed to the lower courts -- Gerald Lynch from New York and Jeffrey Viken from South Dakota in addition to Lange -- each spent weeks pending on the Senate floor and endured a confirmation process that lasted more than three months. Two additional nominees, Andre Davis of Maryland and David Hamilton of Indiana, cleared the Senate judiciary committee way back on June 4 -- 144 days ago. Yet their floor votes are still pending.

Davis and Hamilton have spent longer in this particular form of limbo than any Bush nominee confirmed from 2007-08.

Kendall describes this as "unprecedented and dangerous." It not only leaves vacancies on the bench, clogging the federal courts, but it also discourages qualified, uncontroversial jurists from even accepting nominations in the first place, knowing that the Republican minority won't give them a fair shake. Prospective judges realize that they can have a skeleton-free closet and plenty of support to be confirmed, but can wait indefinitely for a vote, simply because the GOP feels like it.

I think they've proven beyond reasonable doubt they're incapable of governing, incapable of letting other people govern, and don't deserve the chance to run so much as a PTA meeting, much less hold national office.  Too bad so many of my fellow Americans are just as stupid as they are and fall for their bullshit.

Hopefully, even they will eventually realize that the current crop of Cons is rotten through-and-through, a national embarrassment that needs to get voted out before we become a world-wide laughing stock.  But I don't hold out much hope.

Good thing we have so much fun bashing stupidity around here, then, innit?