Lovers

Rush Limbaugh sees no evidence that President Obama loves America. It's an interesting concept, isn't it? How does a person show his love for America? With bumper stickers? Flags flapping near their gun racks? Support-our-troops magnets? Doing oxycontin? Not, evidently, by willingness to pay taxes to support those troops, or pay for what America needs. Or to accept the fundamental concepts of democracy. Like voting rights. Providing for a well-informed electorate. Respecting minorities, leaving religion out of our politics. No, evidently just saying you love America is enough. Actions aren't. Except for the action where you say you love America.

Not, with respect to our president, stuff like killing terrorists, saving the auto industry, ending the recession. Not increasing drilling for oil, proposing regulations to prevent another Wall Street meltdown and bailout. Supporting equal rights doesn't count. And, most assuredly, neither does trying to provide access to health care for those Americans Rush Limbaugh doesn't see as Americans. Poor people, non-white people. People not born here. Democrats. Liberals. Not Americans, that's for damn sure. Can't try to help those people while loving America. The America Rush loves fits into his studio, especially if he's not there.

Trying to improve American education doesn't qualify as love, evidently. Working to see to it that America remains part of the picture when it comes to innovation, research, energy independence. Doesn't count. Isn't flapping in the breeze like a flag, isn't in-your-face-America-fuck-yeah enough. Isn't on talk radio or sung by Ted Nugent. Ending wars isn't America-loving. Neither is reaching out to the opposing party and having his hand bitten off. Not America-loving. Not a shred of evidence.

Rush, on the other hand, loves America. Well, as long as you don't include its citizens; not the ones that disagree with him, the ones that support voting rights, women's health, or returning tax rates for the very wealthy to where they were when America was booming like a sage grouse in springtime. To Rush, America is white, male, and Republican; anything else is the object of venomous hate. But by golly he loves the country and Obama doesn't. The invective he spews toward Americans like raw sewage into a pristine creek is love, I guess; the efforts Obama has made aren't. Seems clear to me.

How do you love a country? Bring it candy? George Bush did just that, when he gave it drugs and didn't ask it to pay for them, took it to war for free. Do you sing loud and get teary-eyed, while refusing to countenance paying taxes at a rate that ensures the country's future? Is that love? And if it is, will you still love her in the morning? Seriously: what constitutes court-of-law evidence of a person's love of country? Like all of his RWS™ compadres, Rush didn't serve in the military like I did, so we know it's not that. What is it, I wonder, and, other than taking your lover's word for it, how do you know?

[Addendum: now he's upped the anti (yes, I know) -- it's not merely that President Obama doesn't love America: he hates it. I don't doubt for a minute -- having former friends who buy in like it was a cookie drive -- that his followers will eat it up. When you hear the despicable ranting, you see it's nothing but the weaving together of molecules of thin air. Wild claims, based on nothing. But there it is: America's most listened-to authority, guiding teabaggers and other crazies like the pied piper, the pie-eating prevaricator. This is our country. This is our politics.

And now, following Rush's directions, it appears, absent much in the way of specific and positive reasons for support of their own candidate, the operative meme for all of these mendacious Rs from now on, including The Rominee himself, will be to question Obama's Americanism.

Hate to say it yet again, but these really are awful people. There's no getting around it.]

He's Reich, You Know

Weird boxing interruptions notwithstanding, he covers the issues to be determined by the election. Probably tens of people have seen the video already. Take that, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, and you four or five billionaires buying the election.

Jaw-Dropping

[Click to enlarge, prn.]

I wish I had a better phrase than jaw-dropping. No words for the dumbfundament he invokes; no experience to draw on that provides a touchstone, a base from which to find expression. It's not of this world; there's no vocabulary.

In their ability to accuse their opponents, with no sense of irony at all, of doing exactly what they've been doing, and to do exactly that which they'd previously criticized when the power curve was reversed, politicians are a breed apart. And deeper within that breed than any previous group are today's Republicans, a subspecies of particular mendacity and of conscience-free hypocrisy. But that's nowhere near the nadir: drilling down even further, alone at the bottom, there sits The Rominee: a man of unprecedented comfort with overt lying; a man of singular ability to do it without even a flinch, as if it's his right, his rite, his -- and only his -- special entitlement in his own special life.

But suddenly Mitt, he's upset, down there in his zone of indifference to truth, his cone of confabulation. He doesn't like it when people say stuff about him, especially when it's true and puts the lie to everything he says. Fortunately for him, as long as he stays among his kind at Fox "news" and in the Hamptons, it doesn't happen very often. But when it does, well, he's doggone miffed.

“A campaign based on falsehood and dishonesty does not have long legs,” Romney said on “Fox and Friends,” later adding: “The president only has one thing going, and that is constant attacks on me. They’re dishonest. They’re misdirected. And I think the American people recognize that kind of politics as something of the past. It may work in Chicago, but it’s not going to work across America.”

(Tells you a lot about the lot of them, doesn't it, that he hangs out all the time with Fox and Friends.) This, said with a straight face and not the least amount of embarrassment, mind you, from the guy whose stump speech is one lie after another, nothing but. Purposefully. (Please don't make me provide all the links again: just search the blog, or better yet your favorite search engine, for "lies of Mitt Romney" and stand back.) This, from the guy whose entire campaign is based on attacking Obama, devoid of any positive message about his own plans, talking about which he avoids like a rum and Coke. (Even his senatorial surrogates don't know WTF to say when asked about them.)

Obama is a man who beats his dog, Mitt said, beating his dog. This is a man who sets houses on fire, he claimed, blowing out a match and tossing a can of gasoline behind a tree, moving away from the heat as the second story crumbled. President Obama eats babies, he bleated, spitting out a tiny knitted bootie. Anyone got a toothpick?

Honest to god: I mean, sure, Mitch McConnell is doing everything he derided the Ds for doing when they were in the minority -- and has raised it to Guinessian levels. (Wait for the one-eighty if he ever gets control again.) Newt Gingrich, in the smoking ruins of the last vestiges of cooperation he left on the House floor, has decried "the politics of personal destruction." But that's just everyday hypocrisy. It's what they do when they're not sleeping. But The Rominee. He's a whole new game-ball. He makes you want to scream yourself into silence, to hit yourself over your head with your dropped jaw, cover your ears and go blind. He lies, and lies about it. He lies about his lies, and then he lies some more. And, boy, does he ever hate lies. He's unbelievable.

Except to teabaggers and that group of conservatives still willing to call themselves Republicans. They believe it like they believe the universe appeared a couple of years before the pyramids.

No Exit

In the interest of fairness and balance, I note a study has been released that claims Obama's tax plans would cost the economy 700,000 jobs. (According to another study, that's actually 100,000 jobs fewer than The Rominee's!) It was done by Ernst & Young, at the behest of several Republican entities.

And in the interest of self-reflection and honesty, I admit I found myself ready to question the report without even reading it. I question the source, I question the motives of those who commissioned it, I question the findings. But I really don't know. When it comes to analyses of various political proposals -- the Ryan/Rominee budget, the effects of the ACA, the impending "fiscal cliff" for examples -- I've come to trust the CBO as the most impartial source of financial forecasting. Fact is, the CBO has said much the same thing.

But it's been worse on the Ryan/Rominee budget:

Since, as CBO notes, “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]” and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending — he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre-sequestration baseline — the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans’ programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like. (Blogatorial comment: As I've been saying ad nauseum!)

So there you have it: two imperfect plans, one of which will apparently cost jobs (the White House pushes back), the other of which, in addition to that, will end the country. In a functioning democracy, where both parties were willing to find solutions and to accept less than their version of the whole pie (one, demonstrably, has been and is), where it wasn't the case that one party had gone nuts and had become in the thrall of the very moneyed interests whose only concern is their personal profits, there might be reason to think resolution was possible. If one party weren't willing to see the end of government, and therefore of the country, rather than compromise on anything, things would look different.

If such a democracy exists, it's most certainly not on this side of the Atlantic and south of the Canadian border. So it's undeniable, as I've said a million times. We're:

Like A Rug

Several times here I've asked my conservative readers to explain how they justify supporting their Rominee when he's such a constant and shameless liar. Other than the occasional weak attempt at equilibration between Mitt and Barack, they haven't had much to say. Maybe it's because, until recently, the lies have been about the president; and the goal of getting rid of the Muslim Nazi America-hating Socialist anti-capitalist gay al Queda plant justifies any means. Prevarication in the defense of liberty is no vice, right?

But now the guy is lying about himself, in matters that have potential legal consequences, not to mention that they put the lie to his latest lie about Obama, too. As supporters fall over themselves to rationalize it, I wonder -- in my imaginary world of thoughtful people who like truth and facts and science and education and the occasional road or bridge -- if we might be anywhere nearer the point where even the apologists will begin to have first thoughts.

The only thing that Romney says that's not a flat-out whole-cloth lie is based on a lie: that you can balance the budget by cutting taxes, increasing spending on the military, and still have something left of government for the less-than-him-moneyed (well, it is a lie, but some might claim it's an opinion, since it's never actually happened). Stuck with such a despicable human for a candidate, and lacking much in the way of real criticism of President Obama, whose policies have been anti-capitalist or terrorist-loving the way Bush's wars were well-planned, Rs and their screamers are wallowing in conspiracy theories, birtherism, and monsters-under-the-bed calling for mommy.

In that way, I suppose it makes sense: if the typical teabagger's view of Obama is based on lies and they like it that way, there's a nice symmetry in having a candidate who does nothing but lie himself. Even when the lies start to unravel the threads that hold his imaginary persona together.

But all the lies suggest that those who'd vote for The Rominee can have no real idea of who or what he is, what he'd do, to whom he'd listen (okay, we know that: John Bolton and the Koch brothers). This is a guy who refuses to say what he'd do beyond ending Obamacare and Planned Parenthood (returning to the pre ACA healthcare system will kill more Americans than Planned Parenthood in the RWS™ most fevered imagination), who lies about his opponent and himself, who refuses to release tax returns and blames it on John Kerry's wife: can you really justify voting for someone like that just because the current president tried to fix our healthcare system and stepped in to save the auto industry and has killed a few dozen terrorists? Assuming you're not a contributer of millions, can you really believe Mitt Romney will support policies that will help you? Observing his lies, do you think you even know what he stands for?

If you justify overlooking such mendacity by buying into the RWS™ characterizations of Obama, doesn't it say more about you than it does about our president?

Worst Ever

Here's a list of reasons the current Congress might be the worst ever. Teabaggers might consider #1 a good thing; and, given the stupidity of so many congressfolk nowadays, they may have a point. But it's not as if there aren't real problems that need real solutions...

This week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On its own, such a vote would be unremarkable. Republicans control the House, they oppose President Obama’s health reform law, and so they voted to get rid of it.

But here’s the punchline: This was the 33^rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?

Well, it makes you the 112^th Congress.

Hating on Congress is a beloved American tradition. Hence Mark Twain’s old joke, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” But the 112^th Congress is no ordinary congress. It’s a very bad, no good, terrible Congress. It is, in fact, one of the very worst congresses we have ever had. Here, I’ll prove it:

1. They’re not passing laws.

Let’s start with the simplest measure of congressional productivity: the number of public bills passed into law per Congress. The best data on this comes from the annual “resume of congressional activity,” which goes back to the 80th Congress — the same Congress President Harry Truman dubbed the “do-nothing Congress.” But they did a lot more than this Congress...

He goes on, with lots of charts and graphs. Not that it's unexpected to anyone paying even a moment's attention; but it's persuasive.

And here's the thing: what does it take to have elected the worst congress ever? Obvious: the worst electorate ever. Thanks, Fox "news." Thanks RWS™. Thanks science-deniers and education destroyers, astro-turfed and terminally gullible teabaggers. Guess we got what someone else paid for.

True Lies

This is interesting: while the clinically insane wing of the smoking remnants of the Republican party pump out conspiracy theories about Obama like two-dollar gasoline, their brethren on the right ignore actual evidence of actual lies. Lies you don't need to make up on your own. Lies that are already out there, lies that led to the death more more than a hundred thousand, maimed our troops, cost us a couple thousand billions of dollars, and materially added to our current economic calamity. Turns out, not only did George W. Bush lie about the reasons for invading Iraq, he's been lying about his role ever since. In his upcoming book, Colin Powell says as much:

In a chapter discussing what he calls his “infamous” February 2003 speech to the United Nations where he authoritatively presented what was later exposed as gross misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Powell notes that by that time, war “was approaching.”

“By then, the President did not think war could be avoided,” Powell writes. “He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met -- and never would meet -- to discuss the decision.”

[...]

Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn't wanna use force,” he said.

But Powell supports the increasingly well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point -- or decision-making process -- during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks.

Former CIA Director George Tenet made an admission similar to Powell’s in his own 2007 memoir. "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he wrote. Nor "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Indeed, history shows that Bush had long wanted to strike out at Saddam Hussein and was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks.

[...]

An analysis of the historical record by the National Security Archives in 2010 concluded that, “In contrast to an extensive record of planning for actual military operations, there is no record that President George W. Bush ever made a considered decision for war...”

I suppose it's not so hard to understand. The truth of their failures and the depth of their deception is so great that none on the right can really face it. Instead, their leaders have played a game of hide-the-ball, and at their fringes, where the failures are abraded even more by the image of that black guy smiling back, they've wallowed within one conspiracy after another, and fallen into the black hole of their own minds, from which no light can escape.

Meanwhile, as the craziest of the right-wing crazies endlessly ply the still waters of their fevered minds, seeing a terrorist-lover in the White House, Bush's war becomes -- as if it weren't obvious from the beginning -- the greatest gift Iran has received since Reagan sold them weapons.

We're truly in a world where sense has become inverted. As Obama picks off al Queda leaders like skeet, the RWS™ continues to see him as a terrorist-planted America-hater; while the guy who undeniably -- no crazy conspiracies needed -- weakened our country to the point of near-collapse, and whose reckless decision to invade Iraq has strengthened our enemies escapes any mention at all. Especially by The Rominee, while quietly putting the band back together, ready not only to foist upon us yet again the failed Bush-league economic policies, but his gang of neocon blunderers, too, as if nothing ever happened.

But the tinfoil-hatted, happy to stew in the broth of their own bamboozlement, see nothing there, nothing at all. Which, of course, is the point: someone feeds them this stuff, knowing they'll gulp it down, happy in their ginned-up hate, looking away. Gee. Wonder who that might be.

[Updated: here's another way of saying the same thing: unwillingness to take responsibility. For anything.]

Crooner

Waiting...

In Case You Haven't Seen It

Pretty damn something.

Science. Asking hard questions, seeking answers, finding them creatively. (The stuff to which today's Republicans don't much cotton. Might such a video change their minds? Not if Rick Perry or Bobby Jindal has anything to say about it. But one could hope...)

P.S. You don't get to be impressed with this video and deny global warming. Why? Because it's the same kinds of people using the same kinds of processes that came up with both. But I digress. Let's just enjoy being amazed at the brilliance.

The Heavens Part

Wow.

Every once in a while nature reminds us how flimsy and unimportant we really are. A few minutes ago, as I stood in my yard, ironically enough talking to a guy about trimming some alders to improve our view, a lightning storm -- dunder und blitzen shazammenin -- of epic proportions began. At first the bolts were far enough away that the thunder took a couple of seconds to arrive; but they lit the dark skies like flashbulbs. We see them here not rarely; but this soon became a bone-shaker and ear-shatterer, an eye blinder not usually of this part of the earth.

As the rain came down harder and the lightning got brighter and closer, we repaired to under the porch, at which point the flashes and claps came with nearly no interval, bright enough to leave my retinas popping like downed wires in a windstorm, the two of us looking at each other with somewhat shattered smiles. Sizzling power, beyond comprehension.

Now, it's pouring. In the time I've been writing this, maybe five minutes, my rain gauge went from 0.0 to 0.83 inches, and my gutters are aswamp, overflowing everywhere.

The rumblings are further away now, the flashes mostly making mere embers of the clouds. But the sky is bleeding profusely, and I'm thinking nothing Barack Obama or Mitt Romney say will change it much.

Well, except for the fact that this sort of weather, and that burning the nation at the moment, has finally been announced -- after years of saying one weather system does not a climate make -- to be related to global warming. From which both guys seem to have backed away; but about which President Obama might try to do something in his second term; whereas The Rominee, while taking money hand over fist from Koch Industries, will pretend he never heard of it.

Sine Qua Non

If you need an example of the pot-calling-the-kettle-African-American strategy of the R party, and of their Rominee in particular, look no further than this video. This, from the man who lies constantly, who's barely uttered a word about Barack Obama that's not demonstrably false. And, as more information comes out, even the above ad turns falser and falser, like the Marshall family's chests. Over time. It's Rovomcconnellboehnerhannitianism par excellence: accuse Ds of doing what you've been doing since day one, while expressing Louisrenaultian outrage.

If Obama fudges, Rominee packs fudge...

As I've said many times, even though it appears to be effective, I don't much like the line of attack on Bain. To me, the point is that what Mitt did there has nothing, zero, to do with how a president might manage the economy. (As the President just said.) And the more important point is what the budget that The Rominee loves will do to the economy.

As response to the above ad, I think the Obama campaign needs to make ads listing the lies of Romney, and throwing the line back at him: America expects more from a president.

Only problem is, it'd take way more than thirty seconds. Maybe a series, lasting from now till November. That'd cover about half of 'em. (Turns out, there is such an ad, but since it lasts longer than thirty seconds, it'll never be on TV.)

Related, here's an opinion piece by a conservative writer which exemplifies the sort of false equivalency that people apply to Obama and Romney:

Mitt Romney's unusually frequent flip-flops, shameless misrepresentations of the truth, and brazen pandering has caused some pundits to marvel at how dishonorable he is. "How did this happen?" Scott Galupo asks. "How did we come to this pass, where a man like Mitt Romney -- whose candidacy represents a breathtakingly cynical, borderline nihilistic pursuit of power on behalf of a tiny sliver of the population -- sits within striking distance of the highest office in the land?"

I won't defend the Republican nominee. But I am a bit confused by all the folks who aren't as disgusted by President Obama's performance on these metrics. This is, after all, a man who misrepresented his core to the electorate in 2008, constantly asserting that systemic reform would be his first priority in Washington, D.C., only to arrive in the White House and work within the system.

Admitting that Romney's lies are shameless and brazen and dishonorable (he links to another conservative who calls Rominee "loathsome"), he moves on fast -- nothing to see here -- and comes up with a list of Obama's transgressions which he suggests are equivalent. (Wow! "... worked within the system." The monster!!) They're not. Apples and... really small apples. Obama made some unfulfilled promises, all right, but he was thwarted at every turn when he tried to carry them out. Closing Gitmo is frequently cited, for example, as an Obama lie. But it was Congress -- Rs, mostly, of course -- that refused to allow it; which hardly makes it a lie, or in any way comparable to deliberately lying about what is already known. And so it goes.

I'm not saying Obama doesn't play footsie with the truth; and I agree with Friedersdorf that we've gotten pretty blasé about what we accept from politicians in terms of honesty. But I see enormous orders of magnitude of difference between the things that Obama has done or not done, said or not said, and what The Rominee says daily: if the former sometimes stretches the truth, or has failed to pull off what he said he would, the latter takes the truth and smothers it, boils it, turns it into something unrecognizable, and feeds it back as its opposite, to be gobbled up by Foxified R voters like chocolate pudding, with which it shares certain features, from a distance, and absent the senses of taste or smell.

Ya Think??

So The Rominee was booed as he spoke to the NAACP. Big surprise, right? Bet he didn't see that coming.

Or not.

My thought: Rominee knows there's no way he'll get many black votes (Alan Keyes, Clarence Thomas, Allan West, for sure; Michael Steele possibly), so why not make sure he gets the haters? Go to the NAACP, tell them he'll end Obamacare, get the predictable reaction, send a message to teabagger racists.

Smart. When you have nothing to offer, offer it in the right places.

[ex post scribblio update: As usual, by the time I get around to posting, it turns out I'm not the only one who thinks so.]

[post scribblio pars duo: knock me over with sacred underwear.]

You Doctors!

Because -- imagine it if you can! -- it's even more brazenly false than Fox "news," I never look at The Drudge Report. So I wasn't aware that 83% of doctors hate Obamacare so much they might quit. Admittedly, other than assisting in operations, I'm no longer in practice; but I still hang around with a few docs and have never heard such an opinion expressed.* Turns out there's a reason: the headlined study was total bullshit.

Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.

Intriguing. What's the Doctor Patient Medical Association? [The author] refers to it as "a non-partisan association of doctors and patients." But lots of organizations claim to be "non-partisan." The DPMA's co-founder, quoted here, is Kathryn Serkes. She's "non-partisan" in the sense that she worked for a conservative Republican in the 2010 Washington state race for U.S. Senate, and appeared alongside Republican members of Congress at Tea Party rallies against the Affordable Care Act. Her partner at the top is Mark Schiller, M.D., who's also a fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, and the author of a classic 2009 column about how "Obamacare" would succeed by helping to kill sick people.

[...]

So, they have some opinions. But how did they get these survey results?

The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered... The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys.

Impressive. Not only did the Drudge article falsely assert the study was by a "nonpartisan" group and misstate the data (it claimed 699 were surveyed), it ignored the fact that its pathetic return numbers invalidate the claim. (Had I received such a survey by fax, from an unknown organization, I'd have shit-canned it, too.) But never mind. Any peripheral lie is okay if it reinforces the central one.

Lies upon lies: for today's Republicans, it's the new truth.

Oh man, oh man, oh man, are we ever screwed...
________________________________________

* In fact, here's a letter to the editor that appeared in The Seattle Times just a day after I wrote the above. I agree with him. You'd think most reasonable people, even R politicians, would too. Come together to make it better. (Who am I kidding?)

Tom Tomorrow

[You know what clicking on the image does, right?]