So, why not officially make August Stupid American Month. It already is the month when we are asked to care about every crazy conspiracy theory, every half-baked idea and every bit of idiotic drivel falling from the lips of fools who walk among us. Perhaps if we officially recognize all this crazy talk as the babbling of the stupid then the Country could get the crazy shit out of our collective system.
Howie Klein's question (his whole rant is first-rate):
What are normal, well-adjusted people to think about the confused mixed signals that emanate from the deranged and damaged minds of today’s Republicans?
The Hill: Ex-GOP lawmaker who helped write business tax cuts for BUSHCO is hired to extend them
Instaputz: Wingnuts en masse seem concerned that Stupak will cave. Given their tendency to be wrong about everything, including the price of milk, this is worrisome.
In which Andrew Bacevich schools David Frum on strategic defense policy issues. David Frum asks Dr. Bacevich how he would advise Obama (just around 11 minutes in):
What I would say is, Mr. President, you need to stop having meetings about Afghanistan. You need to start having meetings in which your national security team will help you identify what are the core principles that are informing US strategy that will deal with the problem of jihadism. And Mr. President, if you indeed give into this impulse to obsess about Afghanistan, ... then your administration will continue to have no strategy. You'll have a "Long War," so-called, he certainly going to run for re-election based on his record in Afghanistan, assuming that he does some variant of the options that are on the table, but he won't have a strategy. And I think that that's a tragedy, for the United States of America, at this stage of the game, to not have a strategy.
From his lips to Obama's ears. Highly recommended, if not only to watch Bacevich calmly and confidently destroy Frum, as Frum wriggles uncomfortably in his seat.
A glimpse of reality managed to peek out between the lines of B.S. that largely constituted Bill O'Reilly's weekly conversation with Bernard Goldberg on Tuesday.
Goldberg: I think the guys at the White House, the political guys at the White House, say, 'You know, you have a couple of people here on this network who if their lips are moving, if their lips are moving, they're bashing the president.' And then the entertainment network, as Juan Williams said, the run the 'So You Think You Can Dance' instead of the president's speech to Congress. And I think these guys are saying, 'You want to play like that? You want to play like that, Fox? We can play like that too.' And, and, and --
O'Reilly: Yeah, but that's immature. It hurts them.
Goldberg: I agree. I agree. I agree.
It's nice of O'Reilly to finally acknowledge that the treatment of President Obama by his network is immature. That's probably the kindest description -- after "absurdly biased," "hateful," and "a journalistic travesty" -- one is likely to apply here, but it'll do. Fox's coverage of Obama has been worthy of a network run by eight-year-olds who like to stick out their tongues. (See the latest Time cover for more of that.)
And so perhaps for the White House to respond in kind is equally immature. But O'Reilly's glass palace isn't such a great place from which to throw these particular stones.
And the whining and kvetching. Oy! What a bunch of crybabies these people are.
O'Reilly then lists the Fox anchors who don't bash Obama with every breath (he calls it "giving Obama a fair shot"). It's a short list. Then he asks: "How many fair shots do you need?"
Which sort of begs the question, "Why not all of them?"
Really: Why should anyone have to absorb the barrage of cheap shots that's part and parcel of the Fox treatment for Democrats? Good on Obama for just saying No, at least this time around.
'Tis a rhyme for your lips and a song for your heart
To sing it whenever the world falls apart. "
Look, look, look to the rainbow
Follow it over the hill and the stream
Look, look, look to the rainbow
Follow the fellow who follows a dream.
For those of you who are younger, who may not quite get exactly what the Kennedys meant to us, this lovely piece from Bob Herbert explains it well - they made us feel better than we were, and made us want to be better people. He suggests that their theme song, rather than "Camelot," should instead be "Follow the Rainbow" from "Finian's Rainbow":
The Kennedy message was always to aim higher, and they always — or almost always — appealed to our best instincts. So there was Bobby speaking to a group of women at a breakfast in Terre Haute, Ind., during the 1968 campaign. As David Halberstam recalled, Bobby told the audience: “The poor are hidden in our society. No one sees them anymore. They are a small minority in a rich country. Yet I am stunned by a lack of awareness of the rest of us toward them.”
Bobby cared about the poor and ordinary working people in a way that can seem peculiar in post-Reagan America. And his insights into the problems of urban ghettos in the 1960s seemed to point to some of the debilitating factors at work in much of the nation today. Bobby believed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has noted, that the crisis of the cities ultimately came from “the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialogue, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows.”
Kennedy worried about the dissolution of community in a world growing ever more “impersonal and abstract.” He wanted the American community to flourish, and he knew that could not be accomplished in an environment of increasing polarization, racial and otherwise.
“Ultimately,” he said, “America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
Like his brothers and sisters (don’t forget Eunice Kennedy Shriver and the Special Olympics), Bobby believed deeply in public service and felt that the whole point of government was to widen the doors of access to those who were being left out.
“Camelot” became a metaphor for the Kennedys in the aftermath of Jack’s assassination. But I always found “Finian’s Rainbow” to be a more appropriate touchstone for the family, especially the song “Look to the Rainbow,” with the moving lyric, “Follow the fellow who follows a dream.”
That was Ted’s message at Bobby’s funeral. The Kennedys counseled us for half a century to be optimistic and to strive harder, to find the resilience to overcome those inevitable moments of tragedy and desolation, and to move steadily toward our better selves, as individuals and as a nation.
Stephen Colbert noticed last night that, when President Obama said he would look for someone with "empathy" to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court, the meme on the lips of all the Villagers (including Orrin Hatch) was that "empathy" was "code" for something -- most often "activist judges."
Wait -- isn't "activist judges" itself just code for "judges who don't rule the way wingnuts want"? Oh well.
In any event, Colbert manages to decode -- via a detour into the Star Trek universe -- the TRUE meaning of that invidious and insidious code word, "Empathy", which produces the anagrams "Meth Pay," "Ape Myth," and "Ham Type":
Which clearly means Obama plans to appoint a drug-addled evolutionist with swine flu.
Sounds as reasonable as anything we've heard from the Village.
