Truth is a Bitter Pill to Swallow

While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq’s “example of freedom,” as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was supposed to help relieve.

-Frank Rich

Hear fawking hear.

Just About the Dumbest F-cking Thing I've Ever Read

But should the Tea Partiers actually aspire to break out of that range, attract lots of young people and become something more than just entertainment for Fox News, I have a suggestion:
Become the Green Tea Party.
-Tom Friedman

Because the teabaggers are so environmentally conscious, after all.

Seriously, they pay this guy to write this shit. In some circles, he's considered quite the deep thinker.

Also.

Pretty Much

The Left, on the other hand, is more or less organized around the difficult task of Solving Actual Problems, one of which is the fact that Conservatives broke the country, and another of which is the fact that the Conservative Movement has lost its fucking mind.
-driftglass

Time for the left to nut up, and the right to nut down.

Posted Without Comment

[T]he term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates.  It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does.  Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it's only being done to "Terrorists," who, by definition, have no rights.  Even worse, one becomes a "Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch.  The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that's the end of that:   uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he's a Terrorist (by which they actually mean:  he's been accused of being one, though that distinction -- between presidential accusations and proof -- is not one they recognize).
-Glenn Greenwald

The Moderator of Moderatism Takes a Shine to Radical Right-Wing Dingbat, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dumb

Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand. The lady is good. 

-David Broder

If you'd like a brief encapsulation of just how fucked the Republic is thanks to the degeneration of our adversarial press corps into a coterie of court-scribes and bootlickers, you need look little further than this piece by longtime respected Washington Post columnist and conventional wisdom Pez dispenser David Broder. It's all about Sarah Palin, and how good a retail politician she is. And indeed, give her a script and she can deliver the fire and brimstone, no small trick given the gratingness of her voice (and her ideas, such as they are, really more like feelings, or something like that, something altogether squishier and lacking in the sort of precision and clarity that you might expect from something usually symbolized as a light bulb appearing above someone's head).

The piece is all about how we all have to take Sarah Palin seriously, because she gave a speech at Tea Bag Nation (for $100k, to people that paid like $500 a pop for the privilege) and then answered some softball questions on the Sunday Morning Blabfest Circuit on Fox News, where I'm pretty sure they give her a backrub during commercial breaks and all the hard candy she wants, which "showed off a public figure at the top of her game -- a politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself, even with notes on her palm."

Posted Without Comment

"I'd rather overreact than underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn't work. Alas, this one worked very well.
-Fareed Zakaria

(hat tip to Bob Cesca)

Posted Without Comment

With solid majorities now, and God knows what will happen in 2010, the clock is ticking on Barack Obama to take charge of what once promised to be the defining issue of his administration. Back In January Obama told Republican leaders "I won."

It's time to fucking start acting like it.

-tbogg, at firedoglake

posted without comment

[Y]ou’re not considered serious on national security unless you bought the case for invading Iraq, even though the skeptics were completely right; you’re not considered a serious political commentator unless you dismissed all the things those reflexive anti-Bushists were saying, even though they all turn out to have been true; and you’re not considered serious about economic policy unless you dismissed warnings about a housing bubble and waved off worries about future crises.
Paul Krugman