With debates, enough already!

Have they gone yet?

I mean the ten-some who appeared on Project Runway Thursday to assure us that they  had all of the critical answers for the planet.

Adulthood has never failed its pretenders more.   They talked of the future with the cliches of the  past.  Tax cuts.  Border controls. Nuclear holocaust.  Miracle work.  Resumes filled with self-glorifying hype.  Guidance from God to lead America out of Plato's cave.  Gravitas,  an earlier presidential standard, has yet to surface.

Exception:  Donald Trump, who has demonstrated by his  mugging force field  how a  once major political party has lost its immune system from hellish billionaire  invaders. He stands smugly in the center ring with all of the others consulting  their Ouija boards for adequate responses.  Until they do, which may be never, Trump remains the towering Republican experience through whom all  talk show  blessings flow.

Still, can you possibly imagine how many hours, days, weeks this crowd  spent rehearsing for their prime time show?   It appeared they all sat in the same  classroom learning to say how much they despised Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Iran,  the IRS, Obamacare, abortion, gay marriage,  job-killing other stuff.  At some point in the encounter staged by Fox News , they could have changed places before the rostrums and you would have been hard-pressed to know the difference.

Finally, holiness has a a lot to do with this sanctified group just as the fire-and-brimstoners have been  wielding threats of eternal damnation against political dissenters for decades.  Indeed, the Republican Party, intimidated by the preachers,  is now on its  knees pandering on social issues.. But Marco Rubio reproted that the GOP candidates have God's blessing.

In the end Thursday night, it was left to the national pundits to decide who was the least craziest, the current barometer that has given John Kasich a slight upward bump.   So there he was camera-wise telling us how much he cared about the less fortunate among us by supporting medicaid in another  rehearsal for his moment at the Pearly Gates.  Kasich , who has long boasted of his Ohio Miracle, stood up forthrightly and described America as "miracle" country and he wanted everybody to have a piece of that action.  The Guv already has witnessed enough miracles to qualify for sainthood.

Have they all gone yet?  Good.


  

Zeus-like Cheney in his parallel universe

Re-posted from Plunderbund


It's so  appropriate that in the week  that Economist magazine carried a glowing obituary of  leading fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett, one of America's leading fantasists,
Dick Cheney,  went on another rant.  It may be rude to link fantasies  here.  Pratchett, after all, wrote books that sold in the millions (in 37 languages), a series featuring oddly named characters and events brought together in his literary conception of Discworld.   A man of humor, Pratchett even brushed off talk that he had found God.  Unlikely, he said,  because he couldn't even find his keys.

On the other hand, Cheney, a pulseless  surviving elder of the Bush era, moves in his own fantasy world on Fox News, hurling thunderbolts at President Obama.  His latest brain fart  accused Obama  of working to  "take America down".  Golly. Sounds a lot like treason to me.

In his words:  "If you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama's doing."

But we do find humorous  his assertion that Obama was leaving a "terrible  burden" for the next president. Like his buddy George W. Bush's recession and the ongoing mess that Obama faced when he entered office and they're still trying to clean up in Iraq?

When you're living in the Fox parallel universe, those questions  don't come up from the host, nor will they ever, pulse or no pulse. .


















firecracker

Giuliani:Even cranks can only stoop so low

Allow me, dear reader, this moment of harsh criticism of Rudy Giuliani before I  dismiss him forever to the dead file of babbling cranks.

Ever since the ex-New York City mayor enjoyed his moment of glory in the debris of 9/11, he's been trying to regain relevance without much success.  When he ran for president in 2008. his campaign spent $40 million and won him a single delegate. He's also the guy who, as a married man, paraded his mistress around City Hall.  And
who in the annals of criminality can forget that he appointed his friend Bernard Kerik as police commissioner, the fellow who was later convicted  of corruption  and went to prison? The Los Angeles Times noted the case was a good fit for a Sopranos episode.

And now, he has reemerged, to the delight of Fox News, as the deranged fringe biographer of President Obama's alleged enmity toward  America.  At a right-wing fundraiser for Wisconsin  governor  Scott Walker in New York City, Giuliani  frothed  that Obama hates America, adding:

"He doesn't love you.  And he doesn't love me.  He wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up  through love of America."  Yuckety yuck.yuck.

When the ca-ca hit the fan, he was off to an honored  perch at Fox News to say,  Hey, nothing personal. "I didn't question the President's patriotism." Nor did he think  his screed was  an example of racism because, as he told the New York Times,  Obama learned it all  from white folks.

The president was "brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools and most of this he learned from white people".

Was this ex-mayor the same person who was called America's Mayor  and who was Time's "person of the year" in 2001?

In the wake of  his startling eruption of incendiary remarks, I would advise Rudy to quit when you are  behind. We heard you the first time. You don't need the money nor merit badges from the extreme right.

Scott Walker,the probable Republican presidential candidate du jour,  sat near the podium and found nothing amiss in Giuliani's words.  He felt only mildly uncomfortable with Rudy's  inelegance of expression, explaining,"Maybe he should have chosen a different phraseology for his remarks."

But it offered an opportunity to Walker to get in a plug for himself afterward for his own red-white-and-blueness, saying only that Rudy "speaks for himself...I'll tell you, I love America."   With that much now settled, governor, onward with the campaign!

Fox News host reduces religious bloodshed to zero - except Jihadists

Although NBC's Brian Williams has topped the hit list of revisionist memories, there has been little challenge to Fox News host Eric Bolling's extraordinary history lesson rebuking President Obama for calling attention to human terror and bloodshed in the name of religion.

Opined Bolling:  "Reports say radical Muslim jihadists killed thousands of people in the past few months alone.  And yet when you take Christianity, Judaism,  Hinduism,    Buddhism, whatever,  their combined killings in the name of religion - well , that number would be zero."

It's an empty non-thought that perfectly zeroes out Bolling as a credible witness.   But his pulpit is Fox News, so what are you gonna do?

Benghazi: Bipartisan House committee said what?

Not a good day  for all of those  conservative Facebookers who stuck "Benghazi" on their names to scandalize the Obama Administration, particularly Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, on the hollow charges that she was at fault (cover-up conspiracy!)  in the bloody 2012 attack on the U. S. diplomatic mission.   Republicans had already filled several silos with fodder to diminish Hilary on the trail to 2016.

But I see in the Plain Dealer  (Benghazi theories debunked) an  Associated Press report  that, well, here is the opening paragraph to tell you where this is going:

A two-year investigation to the Republican controlled House Intelligence Committee has found that the CIA and the military acted properly{in its response} and asserted no wrongdoing by Obama administration appointees.

Game, set, match?  Not quite.  Superhawk Sen. Lindsey Graham  still has doubts and is pushing the idea that the Senate ought to investigate, too.  And Fox News  suggests it isn't satisfied that all of the facts were turned up in the long bi-partisan House study.

For these fringies, they will have to delay  their  schemes to blame Obama for  the six-foot snowfall in Buffalo.

P.S. Why wasn't the  Benghazi story in the BJ, too,  for the benefit of those folks who read nothing else?   Hurrrummmppph!

Is Boehner headed for giving up his kingdom?

In the wake of the November election, did you ever think for a moment that President Obama would be spending a lot of his time dealing with  the shop foreman  of the Tea Party, namely Speaker John Boehner?  Folks, that's where we are today on the sequester with the assembly line at a dead standstill.

Under threats from the the Teabaggers, Boehner seems to be lip-syncing the talking points from the gang on the rigid right, fearful of a blowback that will lead him to race through the halls of Congress shouting, "the House, the House, my kingdom for the House!"

* * * * *

We're still trying to figure out Ann Romney's comments to Chris Wallace on Fox news that Mitt's defeat was a "crushing disappointment not for us, but for the country".  She explained that his problem was that people didn't get to know the real Mitt who now has no "anger or depression" even if his GOP critics believed he was too big to fail. (We, in fact, knew the real Mitt.  He was the fellow with a car elevator attached to his luxurious home.)

* * * * *

Italy's politics have long been the inexhaustible  treasury of comedy, and now the latest chapter has featured the real thing, comedian Beppe Grillo, who got  25 pct of the vote in the latest electoral free-for-all.  Soon the Italian brand will rival the U.S. House for the most laughs.

Guru Mitt is back. We knew him when...

I know it's not on your short list of things to know, but I will say it anyway:  Want to know what chutzpah is? I think I've figured it out beyond dispute.  It's Mitt Romney, the fellow who just lost an election by 5 million votes, piggybacking on Fox News as the emerging guru of choice to advise President Obama on how to run the Ship of State.

He hasn't learned that the political class doesn't really care what losers think, particularly those losers who were expected to win.  Is it rehab time for Mitt?  Republicans should hope not.

Speaking of Republicans, they did display a hint of intelligence by not inviting Chris Christie to the CPAC conference. Can anyone imagine a governor with a near-perfect approval rating in his home state appearing on the same program with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who  has a 27 pct. approval rating in Virginia (apart from his very conservative congressional district just  outside Richmond.)

And speaking more of Cantor, the March 4 issue of  the New Yorker examines the turmoil within the GOP in great depth to reveal how Speaker Boehner and Cantor serve at the pleasure of the Tea Party - the "unrulies" who have taken over the  Republican majority in the House, writes Ryan Lizza.   It's a long piece, but well worth a reader's time.

GOP pol: God is the sole arbiter on gun issue

The NRA's farmhands are leaving nothing to chance.  They have mounted the ramparts with Fox News'  Sean Hannity, whose special training session for rookies blazed  with a special TV episode at an NRA firing range to demonstrate the array of weapons that included the A-15 assault rifle.  There also are reports of conspiracy theorists spreading the word that the massacre at Newtown was actually conceived by the Obama Administration to advance the president's support of gun restrictions.

But let's keep it simple.  Let's turn to Tom Donnelly, the California Republican assemblyman who commented to a Christian radio show that guns are an expression of God's will .

Guns, he asserted, are "used to defend our property and our families and our faith and our freedom, and they are absolutely essential to living the way God intended for us to live."

Time to revive the Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (GALL) award.    The competition is getting stronger every day, but Donnelly earned this one. (What would he say to Pope Benedict, who has endorsed Obama's plan for gun restrictions?)

Meet the new Odd Couple on Fox News

If you're dying to know, Readers, Dennis Kucinich's debut  as a political analyst on Fox News went something like this:

The conservative host Bill O'Reilly referred to the former congressman and Cleveland mayor as a "left-wing nut we know and love (!) from the Congress, right?"

The liberal guest was unfazed by the remark (He's been called a lot worse over the years - a lot worse) and moved on to the discussion.

The conservative host tried to drag his  liberal guest into a rambling discussion about Sen. Al Franken, which didn't really go anywhere,  so they went into a second-level discussion about gun control.   The entire colloquy lasted no more than a few minutes with none of the world's problems remotely solved by the conservative-liberal combine that is already making the rounds as The Odd Couple.

But it did tell us that Dennis has a price and is as street-smart as they come. Fair warning: Better not try to get too cute with him, Bill!

 

Huckabee plays God card in school massacre

How delusional!

While the nation searched into the deep night for answers to the numbing tragedy that murderously claimed 20 children and seven adults, a prominent preacher who once aspired to the presidency insisted that he can explain it.

Speaking from his favorite pulpit at Fox News, Mike Huckabee unhesitantly played the God card.

By his reasoning, a young man went into an elementary school in Newtown, Conn, armed to the teeth because America has banned God from public schools.

The former Republican presidential candidate put it this way:  "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools.  Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

As the Huffington Post noted, Huckabee has debased rational discourse in the past when such massacres occurred.  "We don't have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem,"  the preacher said. "What we have is a sin problem" by denying God in our daily lives.

The anti-Obama crowd: poor post-election losers

If we've learned anything in the post-election days, it's that Republicans are poor losers.  Mitt Romney accuses the president of bribing voters.   John McCain pathetically  fumes that  there is a cover-up  in the investigation of Benghazi, and the worst incompetence  he has ever-ever  seen,  another botched Watergate.    A gun shop owner in Arizona says he will not do business with anybody who voted for Obama.  A Republican county party treasurer  in Texas refers to the Obama voters as "maggots". A Tea Partyer,  he is readying his friends to secede from the Union.  Bill O'Reilly sours that Obama won because people want, of all things, "stuff". We know who he's talking about, don't we?

About the secessionists:  They, too, are soreheads.  Tens of thousands across the land with nothing better to do with their time have signed petitions to secede.  Can whole states self-deport from America?
Quacks like Sean Hannity seem to be enjoying the secessionist uprising.  They're his people. This is the gift that will keep on giving for Fox News.  It's their Obama-caused Pompeii.

Their only problem is that Obama's victory shocked the hell out of Mitt's army, which had planned a major motorcade to his campaign headquarters on election night, a huge fireworks display and good ol' boys  conviviality for the 40 or so  wealthy friends - Donald Trump and that spooky billionaire Sheldon Adelson among them with overflowing piggy banks -- who flew into Boston in their private jets.

That's the awful news.  The good news is that Obama did, in fact, win,  because if he had lost,  Mitt and the Tea Partyers and the miscellaneous billionaires  would have been much more insufferable.



.

No cookies this week for Ben Stein from Mitt

From a reader comes this battlefield report that he  labeled "Friendly Fire", as told to 
Fox:

:

In fairness, why not 3 hours for Ryan to explain tax plan?

I would like to begin the week by offering my thanks to Mitt Romney for choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate.   Even though most of us are suffering from fatigue from the numbing  drone of the campaign, Ryan does invite  our attention with wit, intrigue and irony. In his most  recent appearance on Fox News, which is where  the Comeback to Bush Team goes to have its gas tank filled, Ryan spun a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked for the math on how the Romney tax plan would remain revenue-neutral while cutting taxes.

Ryan was ready for it:   "I don't have the..It would take me too long to go through all of the math."

That item was posted by the Huffington Post  in a list of "most popular" notes telling us that Justin Bieber puked on stage;  a magazine ran a photo of Kate Middleton bottomless; and Arnie  Schwarzenegger admitted to an affair with Brigitte Nielsen.

That's pretty strong competition, don't you think, but Ryan proved to be worthy of the challenge.

Joe Ricketts: A billionaire out of his league

WHEN WE LAST looked in on Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, he was hosting a plan that would have smeared President Obama  with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gambit that failed four years ago.  But when the GOP Golden Oldie  was exposed, you'd think he would have turned his attention to his family- owned Chicago Cubs.  It can be easily authenticated that the team that once boasted of Ernie Banks, Ron Santo  and Stan Hack ended  its 12-game losing streak on Memorial Day.  For the Cubs, it wasn't another day at the office.

But for all of their riches, billionaires do get bored.  There is nothing left to satisfy their whimsical illusions.   Who can imagine a guy like Ricketts  fretting about the Cubs like a kid from a North Side Chicago sandlot?  You can't.  So Rickets has now found a new path for his intended destruction of President Obama.  It's a book  called "The Roots of Obama's Rage," written by a far-right polemicist Dinesh  d'Souza in 2010 and headed for a documentary! D'Souza insists that Obama is ready to punish America's colonialism  by supporting anticolonialists around the world.  One line in the book will suffice:  "For Obama, the radical Muslims are on the right side of history - that's why he is so unnaturally solicitous toward them."

Ricketts describes D'Souza as a "respected scholar".

Joe, shouldn't you be spending more time looking around for  some pitchers for the Cubs?

* * * *  *


Speaking of boredom, should John McCain's friends find something more productive for him to do on Sunday mornings?  As we've all known for years, he has been the leading go-to guy for the Sunday morning talk shows .  I don't know why that is.  Certainly not because he makes any  sense. Maybe because he figures no one will again ask him why  he agreed to Sarah Palin as his exciting chaperone on the ticket.   Maybe it's because he's not considered to be as crazy as most of the Beltway Republicans. It's certainly not any profound insights that he brings to the table. Old soldiers like McCain don't even fade away.

I should tell you that I stopped watching  these shows a long time ago.  They are so politically correct with pundits on both sides with George Will forever reading the liberals last will and testament.  Except for Fox News, an outfit  from whom I would never buy a used car.

From what I read, McCain showed up at Fox to denounce Obama  for not solving all of the problems in the Middle East. He thought Obama should have been doing more "stuff" to resolve the issues and that we should stay in Afghanistan for an eternity.  I tire.  Do you think he's still sulking  because as a military hero he lost to some upstart community organizer whose skin color was never acceptable in the Oval Office until 2008?

Roger, he's that fellow in the White House!

Roger Ailes, the president and guru of Fox News, says he has a problem with Barack Obama, as  if we didn't know when the Fox hunters cast come calling.

Ailes complains:  "We still don't know anything about Obama."

You'd think that with Ailes' vast news resources, one of his savvy people would begin to fill him in by whispering to  Roger that Obama is the president of the United States.      

Post Super Tuesday withdrawal symptoms

AS THE WOEBEGONE 2012 CLASS OF Republican Warriors stumbled across the Super Tuesday finish line, we continued to be told that our freedom was at stake in the hands of,

President Obama. It wasn't one of those Bartlett Quotations liberty-or-death Patrick Henry warnings - the 2012 Class's rhetoric isn't that profound. In the modern world, freedom is the buzz word for Obamacare and at some point Mitt Romney - if he is the nominee - will have to go lectern to lectern with Barack on national TV to offer the second line to his argument of why his Massachusetts health-care plan is so much different than the current plan.

Rick Santorum, when he wasn't preparing everyone for a secure path to the heavenly gates, also believes we are all the President's prisoners. Referring to the wide curse of government health care, he told a Steubenville audience as much, declaring: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom. Once the government has control of your life, they've got you."

Meanwhile. here are some footnotes that didn't make it to the front page:

(1)When Romney carried Summit County, it reminded us of the straw poll - ballyhooed as the largest in the state, for God's sake - taken at the GOP Lincoln Day Dinner here where Santorum was the supernova speaker. The honored guest won that one with 74 pct. of the vote. We still wonder why the local party made such a fuss over Santorum, but these days we wonder about a lot of things. But it is true that Ohio Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine is getting his 15 minutes of national attention for tagging along with Santorum.

(2)Just when you thought the Obama haters couldn't burrow more deeply into the muck, a federal judge in Montana emailed a purported joke that suggested Obama was the child of a mother impregnated by a dog. The state's chief federal judge!!! Responding to calls for his resignation, Judge Richard Cebull, conceded that the joke was racist, but said he only sent it to others because he was "anti-Obama."

(3Down in Laurens County, S. Car, the county GOP has set up new critreria for a candidate to appear on the primary ballot., Candidates will have to swear that they never had pre-marital sex and will never again look at pornographic stuff. The party had first asked the candidates to sign a pledge - signed pledges are quite fashionable in the Republican pure-at-heart schemes these days - but backed off because it might have had legal problems.

I particularly like this part of the requirement: You must be faithful to your wife, cannot marry anyone of the same gender nor support same-sex civil unions. The candidates will be screened for moral purity by a three-member committee. Clearly, this would have been a serious problem for ex-South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who had an adulterous fling with a mistress in Argentina while explaining his absences as hikes on the Appalachian Trail. You might have heard, he will have no such morality problems with Fox News, which just signed him to be a political analyst.

(4)And finally, Fox's Chris Wallace has told us that Fox's health insurance plan indeed covers contraceptives. But didn't Bill Reilly, who once resolved a sex harassment suit with a big out-of-court financial settlement, rant that the entire Sandra Fluke uproar was in fact nothing more than a Democratic plot? He said what?! ? You bet he did.

Once again, the Fox Crocks are exposed

SOMETHING TELLS ME that I shouldn't be too surprised about the latest polls that are not too kind to Fox News. But on the other hand, when was the last time that you learned the downside of the Fox Crocks more or less confirming that "no Fox news is good news"?

Here's what happily inspires me to mention this: According to a Farleigh Dickinson University poll, "people who watch Fox News are 18-p0ints less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew the government" than people who don't watch any news at all. There are more examples of the network's abiding slow learners. It reinforces something that the University of Maryland's research turned up last year. Alas, people who watch the Fox Crocks are more likely to be misinformed. Well, now.

We thought of this as Fox News "legal expert" Megyn Kelly joined Bill O'Reilly in putting a happy face on the pepper sprayers in Oakland. She called it a "food product". But as one commenter dared: Let's see you spray it on your own food.

And another thing: O'Reilly didn't hesitate to slip in the thought that UC Davis, where the horrendous event occurred, is a "fairly liberal" campus.

Never mind. That explains everything.

Murdoch in London: Not having a very good day

THESE HAVE NOT BEEN the best of times for world media colossus Rupert Murdoch. The hacking scandal in London has forced him to regroup with one less newspaper - the scoop-driven tabloid that had been the biggest English-language newspaper in the world. You don't get that way without juicy peekaboos of the rich and the famous. And you don't get shut down by owner Murdoch unless he is in the greatest damage control mode in media history. Few, if any, outside the Murdoch empire are inclined to weep.

The ugly slop that Murdoch's News Corp. is trying to ooze out of specifically centers on the company's News of the World, whose sneaky intrusions reached as high as the country's beloved royalty to various other victims along the way. It now embraces private investigators, politicians, the prime minister , bribed police and anyone else that the paper found useful in titillating its readers. It has been going on for a decade, which shows you the depths of tolerance and benign neglect that some public officials exercised in the paper's behalf.

But it wasn't until the scandal sheet hacked the voicemail of a girl before she was found dead that people started to take the paper's unlawful tactics seriously enough for officials to respond.

Team Murdoch, which presides over Fox News in America, reacted to the perilous news about its gossipy ways to set up funds for potentially explosive law suits that would get quite monstrously costly.(By the way, Media Matters is reporting that the gang at Fox News has largely ignored the nasty cause celebre. Are you surprised? Wouldn't think so.)

Murdoch, his son James and his top editor, Rebekah Brooks have now been asked to appear before Parliament to to explain the paper's bad habits.

The scandal couldn't have come at a worse time for Murdoch as he is deeply engaged in a multibillion dollar takeover of BSkyB, Britain's largest pay TV provider. (Murdock never thinks small.) There is growing disaffection for the deal by Parliament as well as for Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who has been described as a close friend of the Murdochs. It was Cameron, after all, who hired f0rmer Murdoch editor Andy Coulson, as Cameron's press spokesman. A few days ago Coulson was arrested and charged with, um, "inappropriate' payoffs to some police who were in on the deal.

More damage control: Cameron now stands with those who oppose the Murdoch TV takeover. Makes sense to me, in a survival sort of way

UPDATE: MURDOCH HAS WITHDRAWN HIS $12 BILLION BID TO TAKE OVER BSKYB. You bet I am swept with schadenfreude.

Coulter's remedy for deadly mob scenes

NOT TO BE OUTDONE by Sen. Shelby's inane attack on a Nobel Laureate, hyperactive Ann Coulter has shoveled a deeper hole for madness by telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that she wasn't at all embarassed by the fatal outcome of the 1970 Kent State protest because "that's what you do with a mob." We're fortunate that visiting hours to her padded room are limited mostly to the pundits at Fox News.