Conservative Mad Libs!

The Republican objections to any Democratic nominee are starting to feel like a game of MadLibs.

Okay, fill in the name of the nominee, then choose from this list of words & phrases:

Left.

Liberal.

Extreme.

Activist.

Outside the Mainstream.

Radical.

Reverse Racism.

Legislating From The Bench.

Marxist.

Socialist.

Elitist.

Out Of Touch.

Agenda.

And go!

Here's Kathleen Parker writing in the Washington Post (and when did the Washington Post become such a joke? Didn't they publish the Pentagon Papers? Weren't they a good paper even pretty recently?)

Elena Kagan is miles away from mainstream America

Much has been made of Kagan's career path and her professional trailblazing. Despite a lack of any judicial experience, she is the first of her sex in two previously male-dominated domains -- first female dean of Harvard Law School and first female U.S. solicitor general.

No small accomplishments. But though we are what we do, what we do is not all of what we are.

(we are, we do we are to dee too? Is this just mental gymnastics to justify minimizing her accomplishments?)

We are also products of place. Where we grew up and how we experienced the physical environment of our formation are also a part of who we are.

What is Kagan's geography?. . . Coincidentally, she shares the same home town as the other two women on the court. Assuming Kagan is confirmed, all three women will hail from New York. Kagan grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx and Ruth Bader Ginsburg is from Brooklyn. If diversity on the court is our goal, we may be missing a region or two.

I think anyone who has spent any time in New York can tell you, they may be the same city, but those are three different worlds. But still, Three New Yorkers? Yeah, it sounds way better to object to that than to object to having three women or one kinda butchy woman, if you know what I mean. . . Yeah, let's go with the New York thing so we sound less like assholes!

These facts ultimately may be more anecdotally interesting than significant in terms of how a justice might perform.

Or, or, um they could be neither!

Then again, spending one's formative years walking past the infamously crime-riddled Murder Hotel en route to school, as Kagan did -- and, say, walking past the First Baptist Church to ballet class -- are not the same cultural marinade. The latter hypothetical is proffered only for the sake of contrast and metaphor. It seems remote to unlikely that a woman whose life has involved Baptist churches and ballet slippers would find herself on a track to today's Supreme Court, though that ought not to be the case.

Oh, I don't like where this is going! Let me just skip ahead a little bit, and. . .

with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant.

Oh my God! You're really going to go with the "there are too many Jews and Catholics" argument? I thought we agreed we were just going to trash New Yorkers, and everyone would just know that "New York" is code for "Jews and swarthy immigrants." You can't just come out and say, "hey, we've already got two Jews!" without sounding like a paranoid racist asshole.
And if you're going to claim that there are too many Catholics, you're gonna sound just a tad disingenuous considering the Catholics are:

Scalia (Reagan Nominee)

Kennedy (Reagan)

Thomas (Bush I)

Alito (Bush II)

Roberts (Bush II)
and
Sotomayor (Obama)

So, if you have a problem with all the Catholics, seems like you should have objected a while back. Just saying.

Also, having a problem with too many Catholics? Kinda makes you sound like this guy:

Roman Catholics control the US Supreme Court

The members of the US Supreme Court are papal soldiers.

When the One World Government is introduced to solve an emerging global crisis in the Great Tribulation, a papal controlled US Supreme Court will not object to a US President handing over his executive powers to the Vatican. Even today, both the Vice President and The Speaker on Capitol Hill are Roman Catholics.

Not to be outdone, GOP Chairman Michael Steele put out a statement which reads in part:

". . . what Americans want is a justice who will stay true to the Constitution and defend the rights of all Americans, adhering to the rule of law instead of legislating from the bench. Given Kagan’s opposition to allowing military recruiters access to her law school’s campus, her endorsement of the liberal agenda and her support for statements suggesting that the Constitution 'as originally drafted and conceived, was defective,’ you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions. . ."

Of course, the statement he refers to was made by none other than Thurgood Freakin Marshall, but yeah, let's pretend it's some radical hippie commie thing.

Mr. Steele, here's a quick rule of thumb, just for future reference. If, during a discussion of Constitutional Law, one finds that one is in agreement with Thurgood Marshall, one can pretty much go ahead and assume that one is right.
Also, the particular defect to which Justice Marshall was referring was the enshrinement of slavery as legal in the original Constitution, so um, you know. Kinda tough to argue that one.

And also, even if you don't bother to find out to what defect Marshall was referring, the mere fact that the Founding Fathers felt the need to amend the Constitution 10 times before it was ratified (Bill of Rights? Maybe you've heard of it?) and that it has been amended several times since, would indicate that Marshall wasn't the only one who saw a few flaws in the document.
But hey, good job working "liberal agenda" and "legislating from the bench" into one short paragraph.

Nice Work!

Michael Steele Strikes Again!

Only the legendary Micheal Steele could pull this off:
Is it possible to seem borderline racist and hopelessly out of date within a single two-word idiom?

Yes. Apparently it is!




Holy Cow, Mike! No one has used the term "Honest Injun" since Wally and the Beav!
I thought you were supposed to be bringin' the street cred up in this G.O.Party.
Way to go!



Okay, that's better. Now you're just a buffoon.

FIX IT!

Micheal Steele just gets more and more ridiculous. Here's his solution to the health care crisis:

So if it’s a cost problem, it’s easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It’s not that complicated.

If it’s an access question, people don’t have access to health care, then figure out who they are, and give them access! Hello?! Am I missing something here? If my friend Trevor has access to health care, and I don’t, why do I need to overhaul the entire system so I can get access he already has? Why don’t you just focus on me and get me access?

Did anyone else think of this:

When they heard that?

Michael Steele

As if he hasn't embarrassed himself enough lately, Mr Steele had this to say on the subject of global climate change:

“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.”

The warming is part of the cooling process? I'm sorry, did you bring enough stupid for the rest of the class?
Oh, and yes, there is a reason why Greenland is called Greenland.

Norse legends written in the 12th century and later, it is told that Eric the Red explored the southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland in A.D. 983-986 and gave the country its name because people would be more likely to go there if it had an attractive name.
(from Answers.com)

Might want to do a quick Googling before making public statements.

But really, it's not just Mr Steele that's the problem here. For one thing, there's a pretty slim chance that he's actually this big a dullard. The thing is, he's so emblematic of the pernicious strain of anti-intellectualism that has infected our political process. It's this anti- knowledge, anti-science, anti-reason attitude that allows people to consider their "gut feeling" to be superior to actual expertise, that allows people to dismiss educated people as "elitist" or "out of touch." This pro-ignorance stance makes it easy for people to say things like "the jury's still out on global warming," assuming that the considered opinion of every legitimate climatologist in the world is no more authoritative than one's own observation that the last few days have been pretty cold.

That's how we end up with a fiasco like this:


Everyone knew that Al Gore was vastly more intelligent than George W. Bush, so why did so many people vote for W? For precisely that reason. Too many voters disliked Gore because he was smart. They liked Bush because he seemed like an ordinary, regular guy. Problem is, Bush actually is a regular guy. And a regular guy is not qualified to be the leader of the free world. An electorate with any sense would want to vote for an extraordinary person to be president. The previous 8 disastrous years should have served as an object lesson in "why being an amiable, slow-witted dunce is not sufficient qualification to be president," but no. Way too many of the same people have steadfastly refused to learn any lesson from the recent past, which is why we may end up, (God Forbid) with this:



or this:
or this:

in 2012.