Drek The Halls

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tree Fighting Ceremony
www.thedailyshow.com

Well, you know Christmas approaches when Fox "news" rolls out its annual war on their imaginary war on Christmas, mixed with their predictable outrage that President Obama is taking some vacation time. You know, turning off the phone, going offline, recklessly disregarding all the duties and obligations of his office. The number of vacation days the America-hating black guy has taken is shockingly approaching a third of the number Mr Bush had taken by this time in his term.

That Daily Show clip is worth a watch: I hadn't known about the pilgrimoid views on Christmas.

Bereft of actual ideas, the right wing and their public organ disguised as a news network have become shamelessly dishonest to a level of laughability for anyone with a coma score better than fifteen. Really, you'd think even the sheep-like Fox viewers would get tired of this crap eventually, as Christmas propagation begins earlier and earlier each year and Christianity becomes ever more overtly embedded in our politics.

These are deeply disturbed people.

Dogged Determination

In my continuing self-delusion that, with enough time and evidence, I can convince a couple of commenters of their erroneous beliefs (strangely, both are related to the medical field, which just goes to show you that education doesn't always equate with learning to think objectively), I offer a pretty deep look into the latest thinking on climate change, and that measly one or two degrees that they like to laugh off as inconsequential.

Climate science has not stood still for the last decade. According to the latest research, the level of damages once expected at 2 degrees C is now expected at considerably lower temperatures. Here's a graph that that shows science's evolving understanding:

[click image to enlarge]

A thorough reading of the article might require poring over some data, and following a few links as well.

I don't expect any results, vis a vis the aforementioned critics. But no harm, other than my wasted time, can come from trying.

Seriously Unserious

In reference to the R presidential candidates, Paul Krugman distilled something around the bush of which I'd been beating for a long time: To keep repeating and clinging to disproven beliefs and discredited policies, he wrote, you have to either be clueless or a liar. It's true, of course, of their followers as well.

Along those same lines, here's an article that calls it clearly regarding Mitt Romney. In regard to that already infamous ad which distorted Obama's comments on the economy, and in regard to Mitt's justification of the dishonesty, the writer (Jonathan Chait) says...:

...This disposition flows naturally from the disconnect between the Mitt Romney presidential campaign and Mitt Romney the man. Romney is running a campaign as “Mitt Romney,” an Obamacare-hating, tough-on-immigration, climate-science skeptic. Now, obviously, all the Republican candidates are running on a similar theme. Most of them actually believe it. But Romney is acutely aware of the disconnect between the character of “Mitt Romney” and the actor portraying him. Because Romney is too intelligent to fall for his own ruse, his campaign is one large Potemkin facade, designed to shield him from the interjection of reality.

[...]

It seems strange that a candidate as intelligent and articulate as Romney would require such diligent shielding from questions. But it’s precisely because of his intelligence that Romney must stay within his antiseptic bubble. Unlike Rick Perry or Herman Cain, he isn’t a dolt. Unlike Newt Gingrich, he doesn’t exist in a constant state of childlike romantic self-delusion. He has a precise, calculating mind. To his credit, he seems all too aware of his own lies and requires constant protection from them.

Me, I don't waste a lot of time wondering which of the band of blunders are the liars and which are the clueless. For one thing, it's pretty obvious. What keeps me stumbling down the path to despair is that there are evidently so many voters out there willing and able to be so easily deceived. To approve of their combination of proud cluelessness and unrepentant lying.

And now, as if to underscore their abandonment of self-respect and to remove any doubt that they've given up on even the pretense of seriousness, there's going to be some sort of R candidate forum hosted by Donald Trump. Donald Fricking Trump!! This is beyond parody. If George Orwell could have imagined such a thing, he had the good sense not to write it: who'd believe it of a purportedly serious political party? In the world's greatest, most fantabulously exceptional democracy.

Swamp Creature

I think a good case can be made that the scorched-earth destructiveness of our current politics, the idea that the main aim of one party (in the view of one party, anyway) is to destroy the other one, that tearing down a president of the opposite party is more important than building up the country, arose from the steamy swamp that is Newt Gingrich, with his contract on America, his inflammatory Speakership, his hard-on for impeachment. Nor has he mellowed with age or a couple of new wives.

Memes develop and become conventional wisdom: in the case of Newt, oversize hat in the ring, it's that he has a bloated ego and considers himself the smartest guy in the room. That simply by virtue of having issued from between his loquacious lips, his words are definitionally and, as he'd say, transformationally, brilliant. Indeed, I've said as much here a few times. In this case, the meme is unquestionably (as he'd also say) true. There's something deeply off-putting about the guy, both in what he says and how he says it. More often than not, he's as full of shit as he is full of himself.

And yet.

I also find him sort of intriguing, in a perverse way. If Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry or Sarah Palin or Herman Cain or Rick Froth were the nominee, it'd signify the end of America as we know it, even when they inevitably lost. Because there's simply no way a people half of whom would propose such as those as presidential timber could long survive. Mitt Romney's nomination wouldn't make such a dreadful statement, I suppose; but he's such a sleazy panderer who'll say and do anything to get elected, who has, with no apparent shame, based his campaign (since he has no actual beliefs) on the lie that President Obama hates America, that I find the prospect of him as president equally as repellent as that of any of the others.

With reservations, I'd be fine with Huntsman.

He has no chance.

But Newt.

I can't stand the guy, with his smug simpering and tendency to bloviate untethered. Easy lie the lies that lie within him (cf: I'm not a lobbyist.) But for some damn reason, I don't quite view the prospect of a Gingrich nomination as denoting the end of the electorate's ability to think straight. Given their other choices, were Republicans to draw his card, it wouldn't have been from the bottom of the deck. If one looks at politics as entertainment (the best I can do to stay sane) and as the Republican party as a circus act, there's a certain mordant fascination with the idea of Newt Gingrich floating steatorrheaically to the top of the big top. He was Speaker of the House, after all. Sure, the only one ever tossed because of ethical violations, but still. Christians, evidently, are more inclined to love a guy who sinned (ethics, adultery, lying) and repented than one who, like Mitt, seems never to have sinned at all. Especially if the latter isn't even a real Christian.

And, confoundingly for a party embracing Sarah Palin's war on knowledge and expertise, Mr Speaker was a professor. Who wasn't granted tenure, to be sure; from a college no one ever heard of. Nevertheless the paradox is interesting.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's not impossible to understand -- and not entirely shocking, at least compared to the previously enumerated ignorami -- that a few quasi-thoughtful people could ask Newt for a dance. How they could do so while leaving Jon Huntsman on the sidelines is inexplicable; but if you just look at Newt qua Newt, list his CV and ignore his reality, don't scratch below the surface, he could be considered legitimate.

I know: I'm not making sense. But, unlike the rest of the Republican field, who are mostly a waste of Krebs cycle enzymes, there's something about Newt from which I can't entirely look away. As with cancer, there's both abhorrence and fascination about the fact that he exists.

And then, just as I finished writing the above, I saw this:

And I remembered what a dangerous, zealous theocrat he really is. Never mind the obvious lie in saying he doesn't care to whom you pray as long as you pray. The idea that unless you pray you have no moral compass is typical Christianist deluded self-importance. Coming from a guy who served divorce papers to his wife while she was hospitalized with cancer, and who calls for jailing people who failed to rein in Fannie and Freddie, while himself raking in one-point-three mill from Fanny and Freddie, whose moral compass -- evidence for the existence of which is thin indeed -- points neither to magnetic nor true north, it's pretty damn infuriating.

Had he his way, we'd be looking longingly at the freedoms found in those nations ruled by Sharia law. Those of us, that is, who believe that true religious freedom comes when the state separates itself from all of it. And those of us -- a group which also includes many of the religious among us -- whose view of religion differs from Newt's.

A Word

Worth hanging in for the last five minutes or so.

Cain Still Can

The cool thing about suspending your campaign instead of ending it is that you get to keep collecting donations to it. The guy may not know anything, but he ain't dumb. The "dumb" is in his supporters.

Steve Schmidt, who managed Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential race, offered a far harsher assessment of the Cain moment.

“That Cain’s candidacy was taken seriously for longer than a nano-second in a time of genuine crisis for the country raises fundamental questions about the health of the political process and the Republican party,” Schmidt said.

Or P.T.?

[click image to enlarge]

(If the title reference is too obscure for some readers, this might help.)

Consistent

Okay, I have to take it all back: Mitt Romney is a man of constancy after all.

World View

My oldest friend is traveling in Europe (again). In his emails he's said more than once how astounded Europeans are (yeah, I know, why should we give a shit, right?) at the spectacle of American politics in this election season. Along those lines, and probably breaching some form of netiquette, I'll reprint the following article in its entirety. And I'll remind the reader that the last sentence is something I've said here many times:

A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools

By Scott Horton

The German newsweekly Spiegel takes the latest disclosures concerning Herman Cain and the rise of Newt Gingrich as an opportunity to offer a foreign bird’s-eye view of the current Republican Party and the American media froth around it. My translation:

“Africa is a country. The Taliban rule in Libya. Muslims are terrorists. Immigrants are mostly criminals, Occupy Wall Street protesters are always dirty. And women who claim to have been sexually molested should kindly keep quiet.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of the Republican Party. Or rather: to the distorted world of its presidential campaign. For months it has coiled through the country like a traveling circus, from debate to debate, from scandal to scandal, contesting the mightiest office in the world — and nothing is ever too unfathomable for them… These eight presidential wannabes are happy enough not only to demolish their own reputations but also that of their party, the once worthy party of Abraham Lincoln. They are also ruining the reputation of the United States.

They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party’s boosters are horrified by the spectacle…

Platitudes in lieu of programs: in serious times that demand the smartest, these clowns offer blather that is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans. But as with all freak shows, it would be impossible without a stage, the U.S. media, which has been neutered by the demands of political correctness, and a welcoming audience, a party base that seems to have been lobotomized overnight. Notwithstanding the subterranean depths of the primary process, the press and broadcasters proclaim one clown after the next to be the new frontrunner, in predictable news cycles of forty-five days.

Spiegel ties the disintegration of the Republican Party to the Tea Party, “a ‘popular movement’ that was sponsored by Fox News and never showed any interest in the business of government — neither in information nor intellect, which are its requisites, but rather in a self-marketing exercise driven by commissions and millions.”

The most important observation Spiegel offers is this: At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk.

Count me among those who mourn the loss of Republican rationality. The country needs two strong parties, both thoughtful, intellectually credible, each committed to doing what's right for the country, including making necessary compromises. It's only those blinded by Fox "news" and deafened by the RWS™ who fail to see and condemn the obvious degradation of the R party into a destructive, untethered abomination, to the detriment of us all. In this case, the view from Europe is a clear one.

Hyperbole

Newt Gingrich -- he of limitless intellectual self-regard -- likes hyperbole the way others like respiration.

To people grounded in reality, it's mostly amusing; but, given the tendency of his listeners to take him seriously (someone recently said Newt Gingrich is a stupid man's idea of a what a smart person sounds like), it's also a little frightening. His is a curious perversion of the Palinesque deliberate anti-intellectualism: she thinks people who know stuff are elitist and unamerican; Newt thinks he's the only person alive who knows stuff. And when facts get in his way, he simply dismisses them. (In that, of course, he's right in the mainstream of twenty-first century Republicanism.) Thus, he recently referred to the CBO as a socialist organization. You know: the budgetary analysts generally regarded as among the most credible and politically neutral agencies in the government.

Says Bruce Bartlett, Republican, once Saint Ronnie's chief economic adviser:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. “is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”

Mr. Gingrich’s charge is complete nonsense. The former C.B.O. director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, now a Republican policy adviser, labeled the description “ludicrous.” Most policy analysts from both sides of the aisle would say the C.B.O. is one of the very few analytical institutions left in government that one can trust implicitly.

[...]

...In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, “If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies.”

This is typical of Mr. Gingrich’s modus operandi. He has always considered himself to be the smartest guy in the room and long chaffed at being corrected by experts when he cooked up some new plan, over which he may have expended 30 seconds of thought, to completely upend and remake the health, tax or education systems.

He also likes to speak in threes. And he loves the words "fundamental" and "transformative." And the phrase "single most important..." In his view, any declaration that pops out of his face is, ipso facto, the smartest thing anyone has ever said about whatever the subject might be.

I'll give him this: he's quick on his feet and a good debater, as long as you don't consider truth to be part of the scoring. Given the public's short attention span and lack of interest in facts, and given their evident unconcern for Newt's prior exit from Congress in disgrace, it's gonna be an interesting political season, now that he appears to be the last not-Mitt standing.

[Added -- who'd have guessed -- he just let some Foxotruth slip out:

"One of the real changes that comes when you start running for President -- as opposed to being an analyst on Fox -- is I have to actually know what I'm talking about," he said. The woman let out a startled laugh, and the audience joined in. "It's a severe limitation," Gingrich added.]

It Doesn't Matter

A friend of mine likes to say that the lottery is the only game in which the odds of winning are the same whether you play or don't.

Similarly, amidst today's news is an item about an impending decision that will have absolutely no effect on the outcome. In other words, it's not news at all. Herman Cain's chances of winning the R nomination are exactly the same whether he stays in the race or drops out. He will, however, try to wring the last nickel out of the self-promotion known as his presidential campaign.

Science And Wonder

Economic Truths

[Click image to enlarge.]

Surely this information will end the Republican false claims about corporate taxes and profits, about Obama's so-called anti-business policies. Surely, now, at last, people of the teabagger ilk will realize their errors, and voters will demand truth from people running for office.

Surely trees will grow down and snakes will fly up.

And as long as we're clinging, desperately, to the realm of reality, here's a good article on what did and did not cause the economic crisis in which we find ourselves. Among the points made is one I've written about before: the CRA was not the cause of loan defaults.

But then we all knew that already. And by "we" I mean those more interested in facts than in political prevarication; a group that, as is evident, doesn't include any of those currently running for the R nomination (Jon Huntsman mostly excepted), any of the RWS™ or R Congressfolk, and, most depressingly, that voting group known as teabaggers and those who align with them. Meaning pretty much the entire current iteration of the Republican party.

Healing Hands

The former (as in, put a fork in him) Herman Cain, on medicine and religion:

He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon's name was "Dr. Abdallah."

"I said to his physician assistant, I said, 'That sounds foreign--not that I had anything against foreign doctors--but it sounded too foreign," Cain tells the audience. "She said, 'He's from Lebanon.' Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, 'Don't worry, Mr. Cain, he's a Christian from Lebanon.'"

"Hallelujah!" Cain says. "Thank God!"

Question, Mr Cain, from the back row: Which would you choose, sir, if these were your only two choices -- a competent Muslim doctor or an incompetent Christian one?

Probably, in his "mind" there's no such thing as an incompetent Christian. God guides him, after all. Similarly, I doubt he'd consider the possibility of a competent Muslim.

Blame Obamada

The failure of the supercommittee was as predictable as the lame attempts of Republicans to shift blame. Gotta admit their latest is a level of chutzpah (ask M. Bachmann how to pronounce it) that eclipses all previous efforts. It's Obama's fault, they say.

Right.

Maybe they're taking that tack because it's obvious that the Democrats on the committee went well beyond halfway. Hard to paper that one over. While Rs refused to consider any tax increases or, amazingly enough, even the closing of the loopholes that allow huge corporations not only to pay no taxes but to get refunds, Ds put billions in cuts in social spending on the table. You can't argue that away (except, of course, to teabaggers, who'll believe whatever the RWS™ tell them.) Grover Norquist pulled the short hairs, and the Rs grabbed their crotches.

So what else is there, other than lying about what they did, but to blame Obama? Bachmann says he was AWOL. Michael Gerson says if only Obama had done something, some thing, everything would have fallen in place.

Really? After years of direct negotiations during which Rs budged not an inch? After declaring their number-one mission -- a priority higher than solving America's problems -- was to see to it that Obama is a one-term president? If he'd intervened in some unspecified way, presumably a way he hadn't already tried a million times, magic maybe, or guns, Rs would have licked milk out of his hand? C'mon, man.

Does anyone doubt that if President Obama had intervened in the committee's work in any way, RWS™ and teabaggRs would have characterized it as arrogant interference? Acting like a dictator (Hitler, I believe, is the teabagger-approved comparison)? Disrespecting the co-equal branch of government? Blamed him for the failure and called it meddling?

Obama's fault. Gimme a friggin' break.

[Added: this essay says it well. To more people than me.]

[Even more: committee members specifically asked Obama to stay away from it:

For all the eleventh-hour, “where-was-Obama?” moaning, the bipartisan congressional directive to the White House as the supercommittee did its work was simple: Back off.

That’s right. The message from both Republican and Democratic members of the group was that presidential involvement could only be counterproductive. The more a particular approach was associated with the president, they argued, the harder it would be for Republicans to embrace it. Anything that looked like an Obama “win” would have been unacceptable to Republicans in an election cycle.

What a bunch of uninformed or willful liars we have on the right. It's all I can muster not to hate them outright.]