We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!
Everything he’s saying is unfactual. He’s the same so-called political guru that predicted I wasn’t going to win. And we won, and we won big. So I think he’s eating some humble pie.
There is no policy that President Obama has passed or proposed that added as much to the deficit as the Republican Party’s $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts. In fact, if you put aside Obama’s plan to extend most, but not all, of the Bush tax cuts, there is no policy he has passed or proposed that would do half as much damage to the deficit. There is not even a policy that would do a quarter as much damage to the deficit.
Glenn Greenwald takes an even dimmer view of the Awlaki “kill first, charge later” move:
It would actually be progress if the Obama administration were considering bringing charges against Awlaki in lieu of killing him without due process. But there’s no indication that’s so.
Worth noting for the tl;dr set: Awlaki is a US citizen, has been sentenced to death without actually being charged with anything, and is only “suspected” of inflammatory sermons…which are probably protected speech anyway. May God bless America!
The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he is captured alive in Yemen.
CJR details the modern media’s inability to say “Pass.” This paragraph more or less encapsulates everything you need to know about Village reporters too:
The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics (Bloomberg!). It is “Sheriff plans no car purchases in 2011,” (Kokomo Tribune, 7/5/10). […] It’s live-blogging the [Winter Olympics] opening ceremonies [with seven reporters], matching stories that don’t matter, and fifty-five seconds of video of a movie theater screen being built: “Wallingford cinema adding 3 screens (video),” (New Haven Register, 6/1/10).
We can’t let the people who’ve been hit hardest by this recession and who we need to create the jobs that will get us out of it foot the bill for the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.
–Mitch McConnell
May as well unpack this idiocy, since I know there not a living Democratic strategist or seat-holder that will deign to do so.
We’re apparently meant to believe that those
“who’ve been hit hardest by this recession”
are uniformly located in that >$250k/yr bracket. And, I guess it’s true, Time tells us that:
A wealthy Boston matron has forsworn her weekly massage and canceled the family’s spring skiing trip to Utah.
A West Coast tycoon has sold one of his two yachts. A socially prominent Manhattan couple has switched from vintage to nonvintage champagne, while some of their affluent friends provide only California jug wine—in Waterford decanters. A Los Angeles millionairess, Elsie Pollack, now features chili at her dinner parties; another wealthy hostess has replaced cut flowers with synthetic centerpieces. A Chicago industrialist has turned in his Cadillac for a relatively miserly Mercedes 220 with a diesel engine that gets up to 32 m.p.g.
So they pretty much may as well commit suicide rather than face those living conditions. We can only assume that the lower-income individuals still blessed with jobs are likewise switching to different $70,000 cars with marginally better gas mileage. Or, I guess, we can look at silly things like the proportional tax rates by income, courtesy New York Times:
My God, it’s almost as if the poor (and relatively poor) are and have been bearing most of the weight of running this country (as measured by proportion of income) for a long time now. Who knew?!? We’re also meant to forget they are the group more likely to have lost homes, jobs, and every thing else as a direct result of this downturn. And will be more likely to end up in a lower-wage, lower-opportunity job as a result of long-term unemployment. But pity the very rich. They’ve had to get new cars and switch wines.
Then there’s this:
“the Democrats’ two-year adventure in expanded government.”
Has government increased in size over the last two years? Over the last 50 as a share of GDP? Again, let’s go to the charts, this one courtesy of Econobrowser, showing the non-defense consumption and gross investment (by government) as a share of GDP:
Astounding! How will the Republic survive that kind of Socialistic tidal wave?
This is why they fail.
Some people have already asked how an American like D’Souza disparages anti-colonialism, but it’s simple really: African self-determination is seen by many in the West, particularly conservatives, as tragic in comparison to the idealized “stability” of white rule. “Kenyan anti-colonialism” manages to say at once that Obama is a black, incompetent despot who is out for revenge against whites and who will destroy the country in the process. This is profoundly racist on its face. Yet it’s the cover story in Forbes magazine.
People who talk about our “materialistic society” and about getting back to “spiritual values” strike me as having a right sense of indignation and a poor sense of analysis. The delusion of our society is not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism, its desire to make a heaven on earth, not as a place free of needless suffering and full of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls “collective joy,” but as one in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn.
Lemkin 