Playing Politics

It would take a Herculean effort to make Maxine Waters look sane.

But thanks to an utterly despicable performance this week, Frederica Wilson managed it.…

David Brooks, David Frum, Bill Kristol (oh, how his father must be spinning in his grave), John Boner Boehner, Rand Paul, even Bobby Jindal, WTF is wrong with you people? Most of the garbage in the links above is business-as-usual from the Usual Suspects, but that last one in particular really grinds my gears.

“That’s all good for Barack and Michelle, but what happens to the rest of us? We ain’t getting squat from any of this. Worse, we don’t get to exploit the white guilt any more because that’s not there these days. It’s all gone. He done did it. He ruined it for us. White people don’t feel guilty no more and won’t do stuff for us now that they used to do so fast you wouldn’t believe it”, a Thinker in a bright, pretty pink blouse offered. ”All of it is gone. They used it all up to elect him and to scream at anyone who said boo to him in the last four years. White people got used to being called racist all the time and aren’t scared about it anymore. I have no idea how I’m going to get funding for my programs now because I always counted on white people being too scared to say no to anything we needed at work. This is a disaster for the black community and it’s all because they put all the eggs in his basket and he f***ed it all up”.

sitting members of the U.S. Congress can be heard and seen inciting violence among their constituents with baseless threats of black lynchings, a return to Jim Crow, and similarly incendiary language.

Speaking in an interview with Reuters, Rice rejected Cheney's contention that she misled President George W. Bush about nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. "I kept the president fully and completely informed about every in and out of the negotiations with the North Koreans," Rice said in her first public comments on the matter. "You can talk about policy differences without suggesting that your colleague somehow misled the president. You know, I don't appreciate the attack on my integrity that that implies." Rice, in a telephone interview, also disputed a passage in Cheney's memoir, "In My Time," in which he says the secretary of state "tearfully admitted" that the Bush administration should not have apologized for a claim in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address on Iraq's supposed search for uranium for nuclear arms. Cheney, who opposed a public apology for the unfounded claim, wrote that Rice "came into my office, sat down in the chair next to my desk, and tearfully admitted I had been right." "It certainly doesn't sound like me, now, does it?" Rice said in the interview. "I would never -- I don't remember coming to the vice president tearfully about anything in the entire eight years that I knew him." "I did say to him that he had been right about the press reaction" to the administration's acknowledgment that the remarks about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa should not have been in Bush's speech, Rice said. "And so I did say to the vice president, 'you know, you were right about the press reaction.' But I am quite certain that I didn't do it tearfully," she said.

This letter which details Senator Edward Kennedy's offer to help the Soviet Union defeat Reagan's efforts to build up the nuclear deterrent in Europe was unearthed by a Times of London reporter in the 1990s after the KGB files were opened. It got little or no attention, however, until the publication of Paul Kengor's book "The Crusader — Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism." But even then the actual text of the letter (which is in the book's appendix pp 317-320) has gotten short shrift.... "Kennedy believes that, given the current state of affairs, and in the interest of peace, it would be prudent and timely to undertake the following steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people. ..."

So much for dialing back the rhetoric, right? On Saturday in Inglewood, Calif., Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters had some harsh words for the tea party. "I'm not afraid of anybody. This is a tough game. You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned — the tea party can go straight to hell." [video]

Fox News has exclusively obtained a Democratic National Committee memo which paints the Republican field of presidential contenders as Tea Party flaks pushing tired, divisive policies which elevate the rich and predicts much of the same at tonight's Fox News co-hosted debate in Ames, Iowa. ... The memo is described as a state of play for media and "Democratic friends" which spells out the DNC's predictions for tonight's debate.

The administration's knee-jerk responses are somewhat inconsistent: if S&P was wrong to downgrade the debt, and the downgrade was based on a mathematical error, then it is hard to see how the downgrade can also be the Tea Party's fault. (In the legal world, this is known as pleading in the alternative: when sued for borrowing a neighbor's pot and breaking it, the defendant answers that he never borrowed the pot; the pot was never broken; and the pot was already broken when he borrowed it.) Of the administration's alternative theories, the most ludicrous is the claim that the Tea Party, the one group dedicated to doing something about the nation's spending and debt crisis, is somehow to blame for it. Yet this is the theory that President Obama's political adviser, David Axelrod, tried to sell on Face the Nation this morning

after the full ten minutes on Giffords, we get an update about the debt-limit situation (which is supposedly an Armageddon-level issue) and Kelly O'Donnell basically carries water for Biden on the issue by completely muddying whether he said anything of the sort at all. (His office says, no, no the vice president didn't call them terrorists, he just politely agreed with all the Democratic congressmen in the room that they "acted like terrorists." Ah, this is a distinction a team of a million Jesuits working around the clock would have a hard time slicing.) And yet you know the next time there's the slightest, remotely exploitable tragedy or hint of violence, the same reporters, editors, producers, and politicians are going to insist that blood was spilled because of the right wing's rhetoric. [h/t to Cuz BD]

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann's failure to address a disturbing trend of teen suicides within her own congressional district does not reflect well on her White House ambitions, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi told The Advocate Thursday. ... At least four suicide victims, as Mother Jones noted in a feature published Monday, had been reported victims of bullying because they were LGBT or perceived to be LGBT. ... There are several things wrong with this: Getting attacked by Nancy Pelosi is good for Republicans. To say "X got bullied" and "X committed suicide" shows correlation, not causation. What about all of the gay people who didn't commit suicide? But this is just more "Republicans are homophobes" propaganda.

Every other suggestion was some variant of Boost Workers' Pay! And Stop The War On Workers! Stop the waste of wars and invest the money in peace-building. Tax speculation. Get corporations to pay. Robin Hood tax -- tax Wall Street speculation. Tax "dirty energy" -- in which they include oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. Leaving...ummm?

Obama may be very dangerous but, at the moment, he is not the most dangerous man in America. That distinction belongs to House Speaker John Boehner. The biggest long-term threat facing America is its precarious financial predicament. If our nation's fiscal health was a prize fight then the referee would be readying himself to call it. The U.S. needs immediate attention focused on its finances and Boehner is content to kick the can down the road. Sadly, he doesn't want to upset the apple cart and inconvenience those members of the Republican conference who engage in generational theft.