Category: Pandering

McCain and Fux News Implode Over Benghazi

McCain Doocy
Cranky Grampy McCain and his supporting cast of Fux News douchebags react to their Bengahzi-Gate conspiracy theory slamming shut in their faces

ThinkProgress reports:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) today issued a statement essentially conceding that he was wrong in accusing the White House of changing U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points on Benghazi for political purposes.

Former CIA Director David Petraeus told lawmakers last week that the CIA’s assessment that al Qaeda was responsible for the Sept. 11 attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi was taken out of Rice’s talking points after an interagency review. McCain and his allies then claimed the White House took out the talking points because it supposedly undercut the Obama administration’s narrative that it had severely weakened al Qaeda.
But Intelligence officials told CNN yesterday that the intelligence community was responsible for the changes made to Rice’s talking points. The Director of National Intelligence spokesperson said that the White House did not make any “substantive changes.”

[…]

But McCain, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Republicans, has lead a proverbial witch hunt against the Obama administration and Rice, claiming that the administration deliberately misled the public about the nature of the attacks. Today’s news comes just a week after McCain went on national television and claimed that Rice’s “talking points came from the White House, not from the DNI.” He added on Fox that “I think it’s patently obvious that the talking points that Ambassador Rice had didn’t come from the CIA. It came from the White House.” For weeks, McCain has lambasted the administration for engaging in “either a cover-up or the worst kind of incompetence” on the Benghazi attack. McCain also said last week that “[e]verybody knew that it was an al Qaeda attack and she continued to tell the world through all of the talk shows [on Sept. 16] that it was a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ sparked by a video.”

McCain has also said he would block the nomination of Rice for Secretary of State, should the President choose her, saying he would “do everything in my power to block her,” that Rice is “not qualified” for the position and that “she should have known better.” He subsequently said he would bock any nominee Obama put forward.

But now that every angle of McCain’s attacks have been completely debunked, all he has left is to complain about not being told that intelligence officials didn’t give him this information sooner.

That and the fact that his diaper needs changing.

Hurricane Willard: No Apologies

The roar of ignorant applause merges seamlessly into the roaring winds of Hurricane Sandy in this iconic anti-Romney mash up from ClimateScience.org  

According to the Rethugs, climate change is:

1. A hoax

2. A joke

It’s been obvious for a long time that their standard bearer, one Willard Mitt Romney, is a man who believes that the end justifies the means. The end in this case is the US presidency, and the means his willingness to say anything to any audience to capture it. If for nothing else, his campaign will be remembered for having set a new standard in micro-targeting deception.

An early supporter of a market based cap and trade approach to mitigate global warming, Romney capitulated to the fossil fuel industry funded, anti-science wing of his party in order to secure their support. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his lame attempt to ridicule President Obama’s (mostly muted) concern about climate change during his acceptance speech last August to the the Republican National Convention.

When political scientists and media pundits look back at the 2012 election and analyze the quality and the unprecedented amount of its political advertising, I hope they give the above commercial from ClimateScience.org it’s due. It’s brutal juxtaposition of Romney’s vacuous words and nature’s merciless deeds is a fitting coda to a campaign born of selfish ambition, and run on lies and deceptions unprecedented in modern political history.

One might suppose that Romney wished he could take back that bit of cheap pandering to the RNC crowd, but that would assume a fact not in evidence: a man of critical self-reflection with the ability to admit mistakes. I suppose he could always blame his speech writers– oh, wait. Didn’t he dismiss three professionals before, at the last minute, deciding to co-author the speech with his top aide, Stuart Stevens? Surprising that someone who believes himself to be a business genius doesn’t know that ya get what ya pay for.

Hubris has a penchant for giving way to irony, and often tragedy. Beyond Mitt’s personal tragedy of being exposed as a lying corporate raider with no clothes (magic underwear exempted), the real tragedy is what his campaign has done to the character of the American politics. The 2012 election has been a perfect storm that, thanks to the US Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, saw unlimited amounts of often anonymous cash fuel the ruthless, grandiose ambitions of a secretive plutocrat whose sense of entitlement comes from both the circumstances of his birth and his religion’s religious tradition, Mormonism’s so-called White Horse Prophecy. As Ann Romney told Barbara Walters about their prospects for occupying the White House: “It’s our turn…”

Win or lose, Hurricane Willard will have left mountains of trash in its path. For which, to borrow from the title of his autobiography, there will be No Apology.

Metamorphosis Mitt

President Obama schools Metamorphosis Mitt on the nature of modern warfare

During last night’s final presidential debate, it soon became apparent that, in the arena of foreign policy, Willard Mitt Romney is playing fantasy football while President Obama is grinding out the real thing.

Obama is studying the opposition, meeting with his coaches, drawing up and revising game plans as circumstances require. He chooses the starters, putting his faith in his players whether they are in the State Department, the CIA, or the military, then sends them out to the field. He trusts in their professionalism and experience to move the ball forward, to stop the opposition, and ultimately, win the game.

Meanwhile, Romney is just making shit up as he goes along, shifting positions faster than a fantasy football fan/atic trades his virtual players. He even threw most of his foreign policy advisers under the bus, some 70% of whom are Bushie neocons, including chicken hawks like Dan Senor and Robert Kagan who’ve never seen a war they wouldn’t start or send somebody else’s kids to fight. Heck, Romney tacked so far to the left that he sounded like he was channeling John Lennon:

“…[O]ur purpose is to make sure the world is more — is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet.”

Even with plenty of advanced warning to his advisers that he was going to shake his mighty, all-forgiving etch a sketch once again, John Bolton’s head must have exploded, if even out of just one side.

On record for criticizing Obama’s decision to set a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan? No problemo. Just inhale a heady dose of Romnesia , and voila– Romney is suddenly on the same page as Obama, despite his earlier characterization that setting a withdrawal deadline was a grievous strategic flaw that only empowered the enemy.

But it wasn’t just Obama’s Afghanistan policy that Romney suddenly found himself embracing. (A growing majority of Americans are sick to death of the longest war in US history, so that has to be counted as a no-brainer.) Add Willard’s support for the Administration’s role in the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi; the killing of Usama bin Laden, despite the violation of Pakistani sovereignty that previously had Willard’s magic underwear in such an excruciating twist; the cautious approach to the civil war in Syria; the imposition of increasingly ruinous sanctions against Iran; the handling of the Benghazi incident; and other gimmees like unconditional support for Israel and the increasing use of killer drones around the world—Obama and Romney might just as well have been kissing cousins.

The political calculation of Romney’s debate strategy is painfully obvious. While maybe a million people at any one time are exposed to a given campaign speech or a targeted media buy, alight as they are with inflammatory, hyperbolic rhetoric, the number of people tuning into any one of the four televised debates is [at least] an order of magnitude greater. A perfect venue to re-invent a candidate from a “severe conservative” into a controlled, reasonable moderate that would appeal to undecided voters, including a large swathe of the coveted female voter demographic, with whom Obama continues to enjoy a substantial lead.

Gag me with a bayonet.

[image found here.]

Magical Rethug Thinking

The zombie eyed granny starver demonstrates his compassionate conservatism

Having done my share of restaurant dish washing as a teenager living on Maui in the early Seventies, I found myself laughing out loud at this clip of Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan scouring pots and pans that had already been cleaned. (Notice how deftly Ryan, who Charlie Pierce calls “the zombie eyed granny starver”, prevents the camera from seeing the inside of the pans.) The venue for this overly staged PR puff piece was a volunteer soup kitchen, which just might go out of business should Ryan and Mitt Romney win the election.

As shown by a recent analysis of the Joint Committee on Taxation, a bi-partisan Congressional committee equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, the proposed Ryan-Romney tax plan is mathematically impossible to achieve.  The central feature of that plan is an across the board 20% tax cut (which overwhelmingly favors Romney and his fellow uber rich). In order to pay for it, even if the vast majority of the largest tax loopholes and deductions are eliminated, including charitable contributions that makes soup kitchens and other vital community services possible, the revenue raised by eliminating the write-offs  would  total something like 4%.

 Making up the deficit between 4% and 20% is pure faith based, trickle down, voodoo economics, predicated on all kinds of assumptions about “broadening the tax base.”  Which is precisely why the Romney-Ryan campaign refuses to provide specifics of their secret plan to balance the budget. (Shades of Nixon’s campaign promise of a secret plan to end the Vietnam war, which only worsened when he expanded the conflict into Laos and Cambodia.).
Promising to balance the budge by starving the government of desperately needed revenues, while simultaneously increasing the budget of the military industrial complex, is an exercise in magical thinking. Maybe Mitten’s magic underwear has shrunk to the point where it’s cutting off the blood to his brain.

Tin Foiled Again (Update)

Three GOP Stooges, from left to right, Steve Forbes, Jack Welsh, Allen West, see Signs of an Obama conspiracy emanating from Der Tube

Sasquatch might as well have traipsed across the White House lawn Friday with a lost Warren Commission file on his way to the studio where NASA staged the moon landing. – Yahoo News

In the wake of a laughable GOP convention and an uplifting Democratic one, followed closely by the devastating disclosure of the Romney 47% moocher vid, polls showed Obama opening up a significant lead over Romney in the swing states, with favorable down-ticket results for the Democratic senate candidates as well.

This gave rise to the skewed polls conspiracy in which Wingers howled about a cabal of biased poll takers and librul media-ites working overtime to discourage Republican voters from showing up to vote.  As if their overwhelming hatred of President Blackenstein (h/t Bill Maher) wasn’t motivation enough.

The angry peasant mob hadn’t even made it to the White House Castle gates to vent their latest outrage when they were hit by yet another thunderstorm of cognitive dissonance, the September job numbers.  What the rest of the country welcomed as much needed rain during a long economic drought, the Wingers saw as a devastating flood that swept away one of their major talking points— unemployment over 8% during the entirety of the Obama Administration, proof that that Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to lower the rate below 8% was as bogus as his current proposals and promises.

Now, there is always a certain amount of fluctuation in the final numbers of most economic metrics, such as GDP, which routinely undergoes two modifications after initial estimates are made. The uncertainty in estimating unemployment numbers is reflected in the divergent numbers provided by the two main data sets used for their calculation—monthly polling by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of some 50,000 households, the Household Data survey; and numbers provided by a list of employers, the Establishment Data survey. The Household Survey showed that for September “Total employment rose by 873,000”; and the Establishment Data showed “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 114,000.” (Employment Situation News Release, October 5, 2012,  Bureau of Labor Statistics)

The smaller number in the Establishment Data is likely due to the fact that during an economic recovery, new employers are missed in monthly surveys that coincide with accelerations in the rate of recovery.  This was the case in September, which more fully accounted for rises in the July and August numbers.  Similarly, the slowdown in GDP in the second quarter caused a downward revision in the employment numbers for those months.  In general, underestimations are more common in uptrends, overestimations more common in downtrends, because of the inherent time lag factor. All of which creates an unavoidable, structural margin of error that necessitates subsequent revisions.

The spread between last month’s rate of 8.1% and this month’s 7.8% can thus be explained without resorting to wild conspiracy theories.  But in the GOP zeitgeist, the imagined presence of sinister Democratic plots plays into the larger narrative of Winger victimhood. How else to explain that despite their imagined superiority they don’t have total control of the US government?  And why current polls shows them to be the losers that they are?

That September’s unemployment number came in under 8% is proof of a diabolically engineered October Surprise, a deliberate manipulation of BLS data whose minions are acting on the orders of Obama’s re-election machine, identified by former GE Chairman Jack Welch in a tweet as “these Chicago guys.” Asked by Chris Matthews whether he had any proof, Welch admitted he had none, and insisted he wouldn’t change a single word of his tweet.

That didn’t stop other GOPers like former presidential candidate and Welch fellow plutocrat, Steve Forbes, from jumping into Teh Crazy pool. They were joined by right wing whackos like radio squawk host Laura Ingraham; Teabagger inspiration and CNBC reporter Rick Santelli; Michelle Bachmann‘s male counterpart in the House of Representatives,  Allen West, and of course Fux News’ leading conspiracy monger, Eric Bolling and Fux’s chief business host, Stuart Varney. (For a sampling of conspiracy tweets, see Media Matters’ compilation, and TPM’s tevee compilation.)

Prior to the conspiratorialists’ hijacking of the debate, the GOPers explained that the decrease in the unemployment rate is due to a number of factors;  an increase in part-timers (often a preliminary to full time employment); lazy people content to live off “free stuff,” like unemployment insurance;  and people who have simply given up because the economic outlook is perceived as being so dismal. (Never do we hear from the Willardites, or the MSM for that matter, about the 7,600 Baby Boomers who turn 60 every day, the traditional retirement age, but are still counted as individuals no longer looking for work.)

But the tin foil hat crew, aka Job Truthers, has broken new ground.  Conn Carroll, the Washington Examiner’s senior editorial writer, tweeted that while he didn’t think that the BLS cooked the numbers, it was rather the case of  “a bunch of Dems [who] lied about getting jobs.”  The implication being that the Free Stuffers are an integral part of the poll skewing conspiracy, who hope to re-elect Obama by making the employment picture look rosier than it is, just to keep those checks a-comin’.

Now, all this could be passed off as just so much election year craziness, of no consequence after Nov. 6.  But with public trust in government already at a modern low, assailing the reputation of a critical government agency like the BLS, composed of career economists who have a history of serving both Republican and Democratic administrations in an exemplary, non-partisan manner— that is the real danger here.

TPM describes the BLS and its operations as follows:

For starters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t currently run by a political appointee.  For most of Obama’s term, the commissioner was a holdover appointed by President Bush.  The current acting commissioner John Gavin is a career BLS economist, not an Obama appointee.

The underlying data behind the BLS reports is also publicly released and used by analysts across the private sector and academia, meaning a conspiracy would have to survive scrutiny from trained economists of all political stripes.

Nor is there much time to cook the books at the top level if they wanted to.

Even if the Rethugs manage to lose this year’s election through sheer foot-shooting incompetence, they can point to success in their long range goal of undermining the public’s trust in government, as well as their trust in “facts.”  Their previous strategy of obstructionism and polarization is being augmented this election cycle by attacking the credibility of previously unassailable government institutions, as well as vital private and public polling agencies.

Even if they lose, they win.

Or so they think.

UPDATE (10/9):  Wacky Welch out at Reuters and Fortune Magazine.

Sez Fortune:

Welch said he will no longer contribute to Fortune following critical coverage of the former CEO of General Electric, saying he would get better “traction” elsewhere. On Friday, Welch suggested that the Obama administration, calling them “these Chicago guys,” had manipulated the monthly jobs report in order to make the economy look better than it actually is just weeks before the election. Welch has been battered by criticism since making the suggestion on Twitter.

Aw, another poor, picked upon billionaire.

Mitt Mittens

Oops. WASHINGTON — A gymnasium full of shocked Reptilicans sat in stunned silence as a gesticulating Mitt Romney told them that President Obama would have a slight advantage at the up-coming debates because… LOL … LOL …LOL    

The State Of Ayn Rand

The body politic is organismal and functions best as a whole. This collective intelligence represenst a state of “we.” When an individual cell rebels from the “we state” and enters the “me state,” we call that the Ayn Rand state, aka cancer.