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A Large Failure
Seven or eight or so years ago (which I realize is an eternity in political and blogging terms--I don't even think Ezra Klein was born yet) blogging hit a defining moment in both utility and awfulness with the rise of "warbloggers--" a handful of incredibly vocal and persuasive conservatives who declared with no compromise that liberals were evil, Bush was righteous, and then nothing should get in the way of decimating Iraq, Afganistan, and/or anyone who looked at us funny. Counter-opinions to any of these people were met by, literally, photographs of people falling off the World Trade Center.
They were scared, ignorant, angry, and psychologically imbalanced people who dangerously hurt this country and its future. Many lived in the New York City area, utilizing personal knowledge of victims of 9/11 to cast utter righteousness of their desire to incinerate as many brown people as possible. Oh what a time is was for them.
I think of that now when I read how almost no prominent Republican is outraged that the GOP blocked the bill to give aid to 9/11 workers and victims. Not Giuliani, not Chris Christie, no one. Yesterday Bloomberg said it's "everyone's fault." They don't care. They never did. Like the non-crazy of us all knew all along, Republicans gave a shit about 9/11 vicims solely when it let them hate on Democrats.
I'm not expecting any of those stupid warblogger fuckers to crawl out of the woodwork begging for forgiveness, but you'd think at the very least they could apologize for being such assholes back then. And I suppose I should feel sorry for how obviously they were used but clearly I'm still just too angry at how fucking stupid they all were.
Yeah that's my laugh of the day
Just got an email asking me if I wanted to join the "Union of Huffington Post Bloggers."
Sure, guys! Hey, can the first thing we do as a union be to demand pay?
Guys?
RIP
"There are going to be discouraging steps and that's just the nature of politics. But sometimes those discouraging days really do create the groundwork for accomplishing something later."
-Elizabeth Edwards
When I first started working at Campus Progress in late 2004 one of the first people who graciously offered to give up time and do an interview with us was Elizabeth Edwards. She was one of the most legitimately nice people I ever got to spend three hours transcribing audio of. And tougher than most people who actually ran for office.
We're a poorer world without her.
"The Lush at the Bar"
This week's installment is dedicated to one Mr. Charles Blow, who apparently is important enough that telling us that he's not going to tell us something is important. He also thinks that liberals absolutely love to talk all the time about Sarah Palin, because he's a moron. Blow writes for one of the many media entities that manage to make entire articles out of things Palin says that are, by literal technical limitations shorter than the nutritional information labels on cartons of orange juice, and yet he well gosh you already know the second half of this sentence don't you.
Life imitating badly-drawn exaggerations of life as it tends to do, Palin leapt onto the Tweet-o-phone Sunday morning to pre-emptively attack everyone who made fun of the latest episode of her reality show that hadn't aired yet. That's someone who really wants us to know that we're all obsessed with her and she'll keep nailing dead squirrels to our door until we get the message.
Hey, so if the big red text up top didn't make the point, anyone who considers themselves sophisticated enough to be a "continential" American has got about a week left to order books for pre-Christmas delivery. If you're about to open your email to send me a grammar lesson because you didn't get the last joke you get nothing. You don't deserve anything.
Sign up for the mailing list.
Join the public Facebook page for the strip.
Stalk me on Twitter.
Okay one more and then I'm done
Shorter my painfully long previous two blog posts:
Mr President: They do this shit--all of this shit--because it's easy. Stop making it easy for them.
Everyone will cheer you on. They hate those assholes.
Also he could tell Congress to go fuck itself
Following up on my last post another point is that if people are so frustrated that Obama is connected to Congress' failures then he should start separating himself from Congress. Start threatening en masse recess appointments... because Congress isn't doing its job. Make an executive order on DADT for fuck's sake I don't care about your "it's not the way to do it" bullshit... because Congress isn't doing its job. Make signing statements until Congress bans them. Use every single inch of authority the executive branch has that is Constitutionally permitted. And for fuck's sake start going on the teevee and talking directly to the country and let the Republicans drag out Haley Barbour or Bobby Jindal to make the equal-time response that no one will watch because they want to go back to watching House. If this upsets Congress, then fuck them. No one likes Congress.
I have no argument with anyone saying that Congress, including the Democrat-controlled Senate, is absolutely useless. The Democratic president will be associated with the failure of a Democratic Senate until he starts emphasizing what failures his own party is. It will either motivate Democrats in Congress to be better or it will create a massive tension, in which the President of the United States is seen as an opponent of a body of people that has a ten percent approval rating.
The horror.
Update: here is a perfect example. President Obama goes on teevee and says his office stays open for Christmas. It's easy for him to say that because well, technically he lives at his office. But if the White House actually knew how to leverage bullshit they could point out that there would still be time to "debate" the DADT repeal like Republicans are pretending they want if the Senate (gasp!) just stays open and doesn't go home because having four weeks of vacation is more important than not firing Arabic linguists that are helping to prevent terrorist attacks. Invite over a couple of poor people to have dinner at the White House who can't afford their own Christmas dinner because Congress needed to catch their flights home two weeks before Christmas.
People are mad at Obama because he said he wants to repeal DADT. Then he watched the Senate go home on December 17 because doing jack squat is haaaaaaard. Fuck them. Make them come back. Again, constitutionally-allowed? Guess what: the Constitution actually allows the president to tell Congress to come back and work. Yes it's for "extraordinary circumstances." Let's have a bunch of Congressmen say on camera that fixing the economy or passing a war funding bill "isn't important." Again, Obama versus the people everyone hates.
And yes, this is all contingent on the theory that Obama actually wants to do any of this. There's a good chance he doesn't, and if that's the case then let's all stop asking why we don't all want to vote for him anymore.
Because it's so fucking ridiculous
Steve Benen asks why liberals have made the tax cuts their final straw on Obama:
The left's frustrations are obvious and well-reasoned, but I'm curious: why has this one policy become the make-or-break issue?Personally, I've been far from thrilled by how the president and his team have handled the tax debate, but if I'm making a list of things the White House has done lately that have annoyed me, I'd put the pay freeze for federal workers ahead of the likely deal on tax cuts.
In fact, my level of frustration over the tax debate is directed more at congressional Dems than Obama.
I have no idea what percentage of statements that this is the last straw on Obama are genuine but the reason people are furious is because the fact that there is even a debate about the tax cuts is fucking ridiculous and everyone knows that, including said President of the United States who has said nothing of substance about what is or isn't a line in the sand. ClapHarders will point out that during the campaign, Obama said he wanted to maintain cuts for income under $250,000. Yet that was just passed by Congress three days ago and the White House... said nothing about it. Now it's blocked in the Senate... which the president says nothing about. As Atrios just pointed out, I would be amazed if two percent of the country knows what the fuck the economic agenda of the Democratic Party is. As I noted a while back, when you have to link to a cutesy website to explain What The Fuck Has Obama Done So Far instead of, I don't know, the goddamn White House's, that's the fucking problem.
I've also said this before and I will say it again: All Obama has to do is threaten to veto tax cuts for rich people. Half the country approves of him doing this. Letting tax cuts return to Clinton levels requires Democrats to do nothing. It is in fact the very thing Democrats are best at doing and the easiest single thing for every member of Congress to do at their job. If they vote on nothing, agree on nothing, we return the horrible, monstrous economy of the greatest economic expansion since World War II and Republicans are responsible for taxes going up. Not only is this blatantly obvious to everyone, it is in fact what everyone has known for the last ten years. The Democrats literally fuck up doing nothing.