it's hard to say which is worse

On the one hand, you have all the people who got Iraq so spectacularly, horribly wrong the first time, by whatever combination of incompetence and mendacity, being trotted out again and asked for their "insights" into how to rectify the entirely predictable disaster that they helped to cause.  Because there are no consequences for being this utterly wrong about something this important. No matter how many lives are lost due to your infantile wishful thinking and your insecure bloodthirsty faux-machismo, you will never be treated as anything less than a sage by the television networks and op-ed page editors.

I mean, the utter shamelessness of a piece like this:

The Collapsing Obama Doctrine

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many

By

Dick Cheney And

Liz Cheney

 

 would have been unthinkable had not Oliver fucking North been trotted out last week to complain about the President's methods of freeing a US hostage.

 

 

 

In a sane world, it would be unimaginable that someone like Cheney would show his face in public, let alone be invited onto the pages of a major newspaper to try and deflect blame for the gruesome debacle he had a major part in causing. Former officials like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell, and media figures like Bill Kristol, Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller should have had their homes burnt to the ground and been chased from town to town by jeering mobs, spitting and cursing at them.

 

But no, there are no consequences at all for being this wrong.

 

But what may be even worse is that the one thing for which one can be punished is having been right. With all the talk shows booking John McCain and the chorus of neo-cons pushing for yet more blood to be shed in Iraq,  has anyone booked Barbara Lee? How about  Janeane Garofalo? Michael Moore? Dennis Kucinich? Have we heard from anyone who opposed the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, now that the situation has devolved into exactly the sectarian bloodbath they predicted it would? 

Meet the Press had Mitt Romney, of all people, to discuss how if he was president everything would be better because we would never ever leave Iraq until they finally just admit how much they love us or something.  And then PAUL FUCKING WOLFOWITZ! Who STILL gets everything wrong!

PAUL WOLFOWITZ:

Look, you used the word sectarian, so did Richard Engel. This is more than just those obscure, Shia/Sunni conflict. This is Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda is not on the road to defeat, Al Qaeda is on the march. Not just in Iraq, in Syria, and Libya.

NO, this is NOT Al Qaeda. These are the guys whom Al Qaeda found to be too extreme. They actually don't get along all that well with Al Qaeda.  But then again, neither did Saddam Hussein and you didn't let that fact interfere with a good narrative.

 

Face the Nation had Lindsey Graham who never saw a Muslim country he didn't want to invade to prove how butch he is. 

But no anti-war voices as far as I can tell.(I couldn't find the guest list for ABC's This Week, and I don't need to check anything on FOX)

So those who were wrong keep getting invited back on the air. Those who were right continue to be shunned. And it's hard to say which bodes worse for the future.

ISIS taking over Iraq?

Honestly, they don't look that scary to me.




Sorry. No time. USA v. Ghana!

How to Win an Election

Let's say you're a senator running for re-election in, oh. let's say Mississippi.

  

That's fun to say!

And let's say you're facing a primary challenger who, let's say, isn't the smoothest campaigner, maybe does things like associate with neo-Confederates and white supremacists, you know the sort of thing that would be a liability in most places, but might garner some support in rural Mississippi.

What do you do?

Well, take the example of veteran campaigner  Thad Cochran.





 One can't miss strategy would be to go to those rural areas and tell the folks there that you're just like them. Just ordinary plain folks. Salt of the Earth types who do ordinary wholesome good ol' fashioned activities like oh, I don';t know, picking pecans. Or fucking farm animals, or . . . wait. WHAT?

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that Cochran was addressing a group of donors and supporters at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg.
The senator explained his connection to the area, saying that his grandparents lived their whole lives in the area.
“I grew up coming down here for Christmas,” he said. “My father’s family was here. My mother’s family was from rural Hinds County in Utica.”
“It was fun, it was an adventure to be out there in the country and to see what goes on,” he said of his boyhood visits to Hattiesburg. “Picking up pecans, from that to all kinds of indecent things with animals.”

Wait. surely you mean to accuse your opponent of doing indecent things with animals, right? You can't possibly be admitting to doing those things yourself, right?

Right?

You're accusing someone else, right?

“Picking up pecans, from that to all kinds of indecent things with animals.”
The audience chuckled.
“And I know some of you know what that is,” Cochran said.

Oh my GOD! Not only are you standing in front of a group of potential voters and saying "Hey, I'm a regular guy, you know, a horse-fucker!" but you're also adding on to that "And I know some of you are horse-fuckers, too. Vote for me!"





This is your plan to appeal to voters?
Like, you might lose the "people who only have sex with other people" vote, but you're gonna clean up with the horse-fucker demographic!

 

Sweet, sweet horse-fucking, am I right?

Don't leave me hangin' brah!

Now, I've never been to Mississippi, but I'm pretty sure that, despite whatever idiosyncracies that state has, whatever features make it unique, it probably shares at least this in common with the other 49 states in the Union: people there almost surely find the idea of horse-fucking repellant, abhorrent, and morally reprehensible. Not to mention just gross.

But, hey, what do I know? This is the Bible Belt after all, so maybe they're okay with horse-fucking as long as it's a female horse? I mean, I know in general these folks frown on anything-but-marital-reproductive sex between humans, but maybe there's an exception for inter-species boinking? Probably not.

But at any rate, it's definitely a bold strategy.
And the ads just write themselves.



  Hi, I'm Senator Thad Cochran, and you're goddamm right I've fucked a horse! And you probably have too. If you're one of those fancy-pants Washington elites that thinks he's too good to fuck a horse, maybe you should vote for my opponent. He's only ever had sex with women!
But if you're like me, and you've fucked a horse, and you're not ashamed of having fucked a horse, then vote for me, Thad Cochran, for Senate. Together we'll fuck all the horses! Who knows, maybe we'll even 69 a goat!

I'm not Thad Cochran and I do NOT approve this message.

Meet the latest nut.

It's Virginia's David Brat!




 

After defeating ferret-faced bag of dicks Eric Cantor, the latest Ayn Rand Fanboi to pollute our national discourse took to the airwaves to be interviewed by creepy douchebearded flack Chuck Todd.

 

I'm on TV!

Todd asked him about the minimum wage:

 "I don't have a well-crafted response on that one," he said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/david-brat-explains-stunning-victory-eric-cantor-article-1.1825251#ixzz34SekIcbi

Seriously? A well-crafted response? You're no supposed to have a well-crafted response, you're supposed to have an opinion! You're supposed to have a position! This was a n easy one. It's not like he asked you about some complex foreign policy issue. He asked you about the minimum wage. Walk down the street and just ask people about the minimum wage. Everyone has a position. Most people will tell you "It;s too low, let's raise it." And they won't have to take any time to craft that answer. And there are a few guys you might run into who will stop jerking off into a copy of The Fountainhead long enough to say "fuck that, there shouldn't be any minimum wage because free markets." And they'll be spectacularly stupid assholes, bu they'll have a ready, coherent answer to a simple fucking question.

It's the minimum wage. You have a PhD in fucking economics. You TEACH ECONOMICS! How do you not have an answer? I took exactly one economics class in college and barely passed it and I could give you a good answer off the top of my head if someone asked me if I support a federal minimum wage.  "Yes". See how easy that was?

Then there was this:

"Hey Chuck, I thought we were just going to chat today about the celebratory aspect," Brat said, adding that there would be time in the future to talk about his positions. "I just wanted to talk about the victory we had, and I just wanted to thank everybody."

Because, of course, that's how right-wingers see the role of the media. They think all the media should be like Fox. They think all media outlets should function as part of their PR apparatus. They think the job of the media is to help them get their message out there. Which explains why, whenever any media outlet is less than fully cooperative in helping them frame their story, they think they are victims of some imaginary liberal bias.

Well, at least he can't be any worse than Cantor, and he may actually be gaffe-prone enough to blow the general election, like a Todd Akin or Christine O'Donnell.  Should be fun.

Washington Post will teach you ladies how to live!

Didn't the Washington Post used to be a legitimate paper? 

Like one of our nation's most prestigious bastions of journalism?

Because this is what they've been reduced to:

One way to end violence against women? Married dads.

The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer with fewer boyfriends around their kids.

Now that may sound awful, but compare it to the original headline
 (source: Wonkette)




Jeezus Christ! Taking lovers? To whom is this article targeted, Lady Chatterly?

The dramatic social media response to the UC-Santa Barbara shooting, captured by the hashtag #YesAllWomen, underlined an important and unpleasant truth: across the United States, millions of girls and women have been abused, assaulted, or raped by men, and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack

This social media outpouring makes it clear that some men pose a real threat to the physical and psychic welfare of women and girls. But obscured in the public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers. 

 I don't know what's worse, the notion that women wouldn't be getting violenced if they would just quit catting around and marry that nice boy, or the stunning ignorance it takes to posit that women are never beaten up or killed by a man to whom they are married!

 

All the research they would have needed to do.

 

Also, I'm a little curious, would being married have protected any of the victims of the Santa Barbara shooting spree you referenced above? Maybe wedding rings work like wonder woman's bracelets?

    

Too bad, sucker. I'm married!

But marriage also seems to cause men to behave better. That’s because men tend to settle down after they marry, to be more attentive to the expectations of friends and kin, to be more faithful, and to be more committed to their partners—factors that minimize the risk of violence.

You haven't met a lot of married men, have you?

I mean, sure, some of them are me, but most married men are not me. (sorry, ladies) You think a wedding ceremony takes the jerk out of a jerk? I'm pretty sure that a lot of abusive men want to marry, because they feel that marriage gives them a claim of ownership on the woman they marry. 

At any rate, why are we always trying to teach women tricks for avoiding violent men instead of teaching men and boys not to be violent?