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I'm almost as interested in the reaction of the Republican observers in the phone video that showed Michael Steele making those bizarre comments about the war in Afghanistan:

Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.

Well, if [Obama is] such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that.

It's not clear if anyone in the audience is really aware that the Republican National Chairman's career is going up in flames before their very eyes. Indeed, those who are not too busy chatting and ignoring Steele seem to enthusiastically agree with him. At least the baldheaded guy seems aware that what Steele is saying is just weird.

I agree with Greg Sargent's take:

Let me have a stab at guessing what happened here. I say Steele initially meant to say that the Afghan war wasn't a war of our choosing because we were attacked on September 11th, forcing us to invade. But that came out all wrong because he garbled it by mixing it with an attack on Obama.

Next, Steele tried to attack Obama by pointing out that during the campaign he insulated himself against charges that he's a dove by calling for a ramp up in Afghanistan. Fair enough. But then he compounded the mess by slipping into a kind of auto-pilot mode where he just started criticizing the Afghan war as a disaster and unwinnable because it's now Obama's war. Result: Steele said that Obama chose this war, that we shouldn't be there, and we now can't win.

Worst of all, for Steele, is that he trod all over the GOP's favorite narrative, which is that Obama hasn't done enough in Afghanistan (and, subsidiarially, that Democrats have always been weak on the war in Afghanistan, blah blah blah). So immediately the loudest voices selling that pitch were quick to denounce him. Indeed, Bloody Bill Kristol called for his resignation.

On Fox News, you could watch the negative reviews roll in:

Karl Rove: "Well, that was a boneheaded comment by the chairman of the Republican National Committee."

Stephen Hayes: "It is an absurd comment, it is something I think certainly should cause him to resign."

Charles Krauthammer: "I think he has to go. This is a capital offense."

Well, his tenure has been nothing if not entertaining. Indeed, Michael Steele was the Democrats' best hope in 2010. We'll be sorry to see him go.

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As part of an event designed to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City, former President Bill Clinton made some remarks yesterday [PDF file] that got right-wingers all upset again:

Before the bombing occurred, there was a sort of fever in America in the early 1990s. First, it was a time, like now, of dramatic upheaval. A lot of old arrangements had changed. The things that anchored peoples’ lives and gave a certainty to them had been unraveling. Some of them, by then, for 20 years. ... And there were more and more people who had a hard time figuring out where they fit in. More and more people who had a very difficult time living with confidence and optimism in the face of change. It is true that we see some of that today.

... But what we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or reduce our passion from the positions we hold -- but that the words we use really do matter, because there's this vast echo chamber and they go across space and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike. And I am not trying to muzzle anybody.

But one of the things that the conservatives have always brought to the table in America is a reminder that no law can replace personal responsibility. And the more power you have and the more influence you have, the more responsibility you have.

Look, I'm glad they're fighting over health care and everything else. Let them have at it. But I think all you have to do is read the paper everyday to see how many people there are who are deeply, deeply troubled. We know, now, that there are people involved in groups – these “hatriot” groups, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the others – 99 percent of them will never do anything they shouldn’t do. But there are people who advocate violence and anticipate violence.

One of these guys the other day said that all politics is just a prelude to the ultimate and inevitable civil war. You know, I’m a southerner. I know what happened. We were still paying for that 100 years later when I was a kid growing up, in ways large and small. It doesn’t take many people to take something like that seriously. So I don’t want the whole story of this retrospective just to be about this, and trying to turn everything into politics.

And I guess that’s naïve, me being in Washington and all. I still have some memory of it. (Laughter.) But I think that the point I’m trying to make is, I like the debate. This “tea party” movement can be a healthy thing if they’re making us justify every penny of taxes we raised and every dollar of public money we spend. And they say they’re for limited government and a balanced budget; when I left office, we had the smallest workforce since Eisenhower and we had four surpluses for the first time in 70 years.

... Yes, the Boston tea party involved the seizure of tea in the ship because it was taxation without representation. This fight is about taxation by duly elected representatives that you don't happen to agree with and can vote out at the next election -- and two years after that, and two years after that, and two years after that. That's very different.

... By all means, keep fighting. By all means, keep arguing. But remember words have consequences as much as actions do. And what we advocate commensurate with our position and responsibility, we have to take responsibility for. We owe that to Oklahoma City.

We owe it to keep on fighting, keep on arguing. They didn’t vote for me in Oklahoma in 1996. It was still a Republican state. But I loved them anyway, and I will till the day I die, because when this country was flat on its back mourning their loss, they rallied around the employees of the national government and they rallied around the human beings who had lost everything, and they rallied around the elemental principle that what we have in common is more important than our differences. And that’s why our Constitution makes our freedoms last – because of that bright line.

Naturally, such eminent reasonableness upset the talking heads at Fox News very much indeed:

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Charles Krauthammer: "I think it's disgusting. ... This is really disgraceful."

Stephen Hayes: "But to link it to Tea Parties, to suggest that there's some bridge, that there's some connection, I think is grossly irresponsible."

Chris Wallace: "Why is he bringing up the Tea Party and Oklahoma City in the same sentence or the same paragraph in the first place? And again, it seems to me to be an effort to marginalize these people."

Byron York: "I think this is more of an effort to sort of pre-tar the Tea Party movement with the label of being violent when, uh, nothing in fact has actually happened."

Gee, we wonder where Clinton could have gotten the idea that the Tea Parties were connected to the militia movement of the 1990s.

You don't suppose it could have had anything to do with the saturation of Tea Party events with Patriot movement ideas and agendas, as well as its many conspiracy theories, embodied in all those Patriot movement and militia leaders appearing at Tea Party events, do you?

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In case anyone was wondering where Fox News gets most of its talking points, Chris Wallace last night held up a copy of the GOP's talking points responding to President Obama's apparent diss of the Tea Partiers the night before.

All the other Fox talkers in sight were no more imaginative, a Village chorus pronouncing the president "arrogant" for saying this:

"In all, we passed 25 different tax cuts last year,'' he said. "And one thing we haven't done is raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year -- another promise that we kept.

"So I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes,'' he said at the end of a day, Tax day, on which the TEA Party Express had carried a cross-country protest to the National Mall in Washingon and staged rallies around the nation. "You would think they would be saying thank you,'' Obama said. "That's what you'd think.

This deeply offended everyone at Fox, not to mention the wingnutosphere, where Michelle Malkin could be found vowing revenge.

Chris Wallace, while trotting out those GOP talking points, declared it "the height of condescension."

Maybe the most amusing was the apoplectic Charles Krauthammer, who sneered:

Krauthammer: I think it was Obama with his usual condescension, except that he ratcheted it up to Code Orange into snootiness, that's where he is now, when he looks down his nose at the gun and God crowd, the lumpen proletariat, as he sees it. And he ridicules them because they're not grateful enough to him.

And look -- it's quite obvious what he's talking about here. He thinks that they are stupid because they don't recognize that he hasn't raised their taxes.

Of course, the word that really springs to mind for these folks is most likely "uppity" -- but they probably know better than to say it on TV. So they find synonyms like "condescending" and "arrogant" and "snootiness."

Most amusing, though, was their shared insistence that the president shouldn't be dissing the Tea Partiers, because they're just normal working-class folks.

Yes, that's true: They're just normal working-class folks who carry signs denouncing Obama as a Marxist/socialist/fascist and believe he needs to produce his birth certificate and are certain he is a radical intent on destroying capitalism and grabbing their guns.

It's also true that they are people motivated primarily by an animus toward him and liberals in general, and will do anything to oppose him, including believe all kinds of things that are provably untrue.

Things like birth certificate theories and FEMA concentration camp theories and the certainty he's a radical Marxist. Oh yes, and they believe he raised their taxes.

One of the signs of insanity, you know, is the insistence on believing in things that are provably untrue, even when the proof is presented clearly and irrevocably.

So why, exactly, should President Obama show any deference whatsoever to insane people who spread the nastiest and most ridiculous smears about him on a daily basis, people who never in a million years would vote for him? People who almost certainly did not vote for him in 2008, and now refuse to accept the verdict of the election they lost?

He's supposed to show these people deference exactly why?

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The FOX News gasbags were all up in arms over the Dowd column and hey, you can always count on the All Stars to justify all wingnut behavior, no matter how hideous it is.

I can't believe Maureen Dowd's column garnered this much attention, but it has and is forcing Fox to try and dispel the charges of racism. Stephen Hayes should look at the background of Joe Wilson before he says it's disgusting to bring race into his outburst. Mr. Confederate flag was only showing his true colors.

Transcript via an email from Bob Fertik:

Bret Baier: Don't you have to be careful when you level the charge?

It's such a blunt object, when you say "racism" is a big charge.

Stephen Hayes: There is absolutely zero evidence that saying You Lied to the President of the United States had anything to do with race whatsoever and it is a disgusting smear for anybody to suggest that.

It is a sad day when a columnist in the NY Times can just imagine that

somebody is saying something, literally putting words in her mouth. She

prefaced the statement by saying "fair or not I heard him say 'You Lied

Boy.'" That's not fair. As a journalist, you can't imagine people saying things, you have to criticize them based on what they actually say and he didn't say this ...

Krauthammer: The accusation of racism is a sign of desperation by

people who know they are losing the national debate and they want to hurl the ultimate charge in American politics.

This is dealing from the bottom of the deck and I agree that it is a

disgusting tactic. It's done as a way to end debate. The minute you call someone a racist the debate is over, you don't continue. Accusations of racism are the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.

As for Maureen Dowd imagining a word that wasn't said, in my previous

profession I saw a lot of people who heard words that weren't said. They were called patients and many of them were helped with medication. The reason she won't be and others who are hurling the accusation is because it's a deliberate attempt to change the subject and discredit the opposition with unprovable and unproved ad hominem.

Juan Williams is pretty useless as usual. However, he did manage to knock down Bret Baier's stupid attempt to find equivalency between the people who questioned George W. Bush's legitimacy -- who did so for legitimate reasons, considering Bush actually garnered fewer votes than Al Gore -- and the "Birthers" and other conspiracy theorists attempting to undermine Obama's.

But the whole discussion was a classic Village exercise in self-protection. If you're not seeing racism on display in this country now then, you're not looking very hard.

Yes, some of the protests are by right wing Americans who didn't vote for Obama, but there are far too many zealots seriously going bonkers over the race issue. Let's face it: All these Nazi and Hitler signs are a way to be racist, but without putting color into the mix. It's just as odious, I might add.

What Did The President Know and When Did He Know It?

Ezra Klein:

"Remember those trailers, the Bushies went on and on about post-invasion? The ones that gave Stephen Hayes and The Weekly Standard kids such throbbing hard-ons? The mobile death labs filled with killer biological cocktails whipped up by villainous Iraqi scientists? Yeah?

They were for hydrogen balloons. As for what the president knew and when he knew it; he knew he was lying and he knew it two days before he lied to the American people....read on"

Imus Smacks down Joe Lieberman

Don Imus had a long talk with Joe and pounded him with questions about his latest article in the WSJ. Joe parrots every right wing talking point about Iraq and thinks everything is great even when all the reporters that are embedded say otherwise.

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Imus: "You're the only person I talked to who thinks things are going well there..."

At one point Imus says:

Imus: "Somebodies got something on you, this is crazy."

Is Joe trying to replace Stephen Hayes over at the Weekly Standard?

(I'm feeling really bad today, so I can't write much more about the segment. Please keep the thread on the topic. I can't blog much more today)

Since Bernie Goldberg’s "100 people that I hate" book, the new meme that is coming from the right is to list every liberal that the Circus Clowns and ideologues think are helping the terrorists. Yesterday, O’Reilly jumped on Bernie’s coattails and says he’ll name all the people and organizations he considers to be helping the terrorists on his show each night. ( Tonight he didn't follow through ) In his next segment he had Robert Pollock from the WSJ and Stephen Hayes from the Weekly Standard chime in with their picks.

Hayes had the nerve to say that: " Most Democrats, most liberals are against terrorists and do not advocate what they are doing."

Hayes- You Ignorant Slut! What he is doing is claiming very slyly that liberals do approve of terrorists and their methods so as to set up the fallacy that anybody who disapproves of the White House's methods are aiding and abetting terrorists. Look for the NRO and others to quickly jump on this bandwagon.

It’s time for us to come up with our own list. You know the drill. Tom Tancredo's insipid thought of possibly bombing Mecca jumps out at me. Live Journal has a parody of Bernie's list.