Category Archives: Politics

03.22.16
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Ted Cruz Is A Fanatical Liar, Part Who Can Count

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Gawker noted this interview Ted Cruz had about yesterday in which the somewhat controversial notions of one of his senior advisors came up.

“Frank Gaffney is someone I respect,” Ted Cruz said Monday, defending his foreign policy advisor. Frank Gaffney is a serious thinker.” Frank Gaffney thinks that President Barack Obama, Governor Chris Christie, and longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin are part of a secret Muslim conspiracy.

“I don’t know what he said in 2009,” Cruz said, after Blitzer read him a quote about Obama being America’s first Muslim president. “I just read it to you,” Blitzer said. “I don’t have the full context,” Cruz said.

To say you don’t know this about Gaffney is, without a doubt, an absolute lie. There is literally no way not to know it. It’s, like, the only thing about the guy. It’s his whole essence: implacable hostility toward anything Muslim and wild conspiracies about the secretly powerful role that Muslims have in American life, the proof being the bombing campaigns we’re running all over the Muslim world, apparently. It’s all there is about Gaffney.  Saying you aren’t aware of what he said is like hiring Sammy Sosa as a hitting coach and not only saying that you weren’t aware of the steroid thing, but you didn’t even hear about all these home runs. “He just interviewed really well!”

Of course, the real lie in this is “Frank Gaffney is a serious thinker.”

Bringing someone like Gaffney in is a sign that you are going to have a team of fabulists and messianic, people who desperately wish they could be at war with an existential foe like the Nazis (although not doing to actual fighting, god forbid). They’ll blow up a real and serious threat to an unrecognizable proportion to live out their McArthur fantasies.

It’s a sign of the Republican Party today that one of the only two possible candidates bringing in someone like Gaffney elicits little more than a shrug. It’s an even stronger tell that the party has gone completely insane that in order to “pivot to the middle” even slightly, to appeal to mainstream Americans, Ted Cruz knows he has to straight-up lie regarding the only thing that matters about a top advisor.

 

03.21.16
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Ted Cruz, In A Nutshell: The Problem With Anti-Obama and Cuba Arguments

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Ted Cruz is a fantastic and fanatical liar, the kind who believes that whatever he is saying is not just true, but divinely inspired, and that if you point out he is lying, then you are an unpatriotic leftwinger who wants to destroy America, and probably shoot God in the face. It isn’t just the lying, though: it’s his ability to say complete nonsense with utter self-righteous conviction that makes him so loathsome. His statements on President Obama’s visit to Cuba, written for Politico, are a perfect example. 

Before we get into the heart of his “argument”, it is important to look at how he opens. This is why Ted Cruz is the preeminent culture warrior of our time. Luxuriate in the connections here, in his ability to conjure up every fear that an aging white reactionary might have. No one is a better name-dropper than Cruz. Trump is an amatuer compared to him. Angela Davis!

Communist Havana has always been a magnet for the radical chic of the left, drawn like moths to the flame of this western outpost of totalitarian Communism. Back in the 1960s, the visitors included Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael, while Che Guevara himself received Jean-Paul Sartre.

Now this scene will include a president of the United States. On Sunday, President Barack Obama, a retinue of celebrities in tow, is expected to arrive in the Cuban capital to hang out with Raul Castro and his henchmen, all of which will be breathlessly documented by the media mavens along for the ride

Stokley! Che and Sartre! Ted Cruz imagines himself the perfect melding of Buckley and Spiro Agnew (see, it’s easy!), and he quivers with the privileged anger of every sort-of-smart Young Republican.

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03.16.16
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Bold Political Prediction

 

Marco Rubio

Via TPM

 

That’s the face of a soon-to-be-unemployed 44-yr-old with no real political prospects. This is what having zero real beliefs or ideals other than ambition and the lifelong desire to be the fetchservant of plutocracy get you.  You know, if it wasn’t for the know-nothing demagogue and the hateful theocrat, seeing Rubio, Jindal, Huckabee, Santorum, Walker, Christie, Jeb, Rand, etc be completely humiliated would have made for a wonderful year. But this is like seeing the Bears beat Green Bay twice in a 2-14 season when the Pack  still wins the Super Bowl. Some high points, yeah, but still the worst thing ever.

Regardless. Enjoy this.

“While it is not God’s plan that I be President in 2016 or maybe ever, and while today my campaign is suspended, the fact that I’ve even come this far is evidence of how special America truly is,” Rubio said.

I’m going to go with “ever”.

03.14.16
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From Fast Eddie To The Donald: Chicago’s Trump Supporters

The story over the weekend was of anti-Donald Trump protestors, particularly young students from UIC, forcing Trump to cancel one of his beer-hall rallies taking place on their campus. Trump’s people either feared a terrible scene (going so far as to lie about the police telling them to cancel) or were hoping to provoke one. Either way, they got what they want, as violence broke out when livid Trump supporters turned on the protestors. It was a watershed moment in this increasingly-terrifying campaign, as brutality has become part and parcel of Trump 2016.

As for the protests themselves, ideas are mixed. Charlie Pierce thinks that they should stay outside and not give the Trump people what they want, and Digby, taking the logic a step further, argues that the media will coalesce around these images, in a bout of “both sides are bad” idiocy. Already, as she points out, the right is muddying the waters, and if there is one thing the Republican party can coalesce around, it is painting themselves as victims of the elite (in this case defined as college students).

That leads us our main question: we’ve had days of asking who the anti-Trump people are, but not enough of asking who the huge contingency of pro-Trump people in Chicago are. It was satisfying to see that what worked in some cities didn’t fly here, but that didn’t mean no one showed up. Leaving aside the mix of the celebrity happy and addled curious, who in this Democratic city came to see this authoritarian blowhard? The answer can be traced to a former alderman and career crook named Eddie Vrodolyak.

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03.11.16
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An Untrue But Fun Defense of Hillary Clinton on Reagan and AIDS

So, everyone is rightly going nuts at Hillary Clinton stating that the Reagan’s- especially Nancy!- started a national conversation on HIV and AIDS in the 80s. This is shockingly, grotesquely untrue. The Reagan administration was deeply callous toward it, soaked as they were in the idea that anything outside the American “norm” was evil and should be disdained, which was baked into the notion that homosexuals deserved it. They laughed during a plague, and of all the crimes of that treacherous admin, that’s one of the highest.

Hillary has since said she misspoke, and since I can’t even begin to parse out the politics of this, I’ll believe her.

But then…what if she didn’t? What if this was intentional. After all, it created a huge firestorm where every left or center publication is practically breaking their fingers to chronicle Reagan’s disgusting response. Which leaves Republicans either defending Hillary Clinton (god forbid!) or agreeing with the accurate history. It basically boils down to this:

Hillary: Reagan was great about AIDS!

Right wing press: Wrong again, Hildebeast! He was terrible and didn’t care. Take that!

At the worst, it brings up a conversation reminding us just how terrible Reagan was, during a time of funerary nostalgia (in this case, sepia-by-proxy), and that every time a Republican says they are the true standard-bearer of his legacy, this is part and parcel of what they mean.

I don’t think that’s why she said what she did. It was probably a combination of muttering praise at a funeral, he ability to reach out to Republicans no matter what is right and good (triangulation!), or just a simple brain freeze. But isn’t it pretty to think so?

 

03.10.16
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The Chicago Tribune Has Lost Its Damn Mind

 

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His ghost rests easy…

For decades, throughout its entire history, the Chicago Tribune was maybe the newspaper world’s towering bastion of Republicanism. It made the transition from Lincoln’s radicalism to Coolidge-ian Babbitry to Goldwater radicalism to Nixon/Reagan hippie-bashing (its editorials in praise of the police in ’68 were legendary), all the way through to George Bush. In 2008, Barack Obama was the first Democrat it ever endorsed, and they did so again in 2012. This, of course, was enough for its white revanchist commentariat to proclaim it the most liberal rag this side of Pravda. So it seems that the Trib is trying to erase the stigmata of reasonableness, and let the bewildered ghost of Colonel McCormick nap peacefully in his grave.

This morning, the Tribune gave us its endorsements in the primaries: Marco Rubio in the GOP side, and no one for the Democrats. Its reasons for doing so are a master class in absurdity.

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03.09.16
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An Ontological Political Question

If there are negative numbers- which there are, even though it makes no sense- can there be negative weight?  As near as I can tell, negative mass is hypothetical, and basically impossible. But suppose it could exist- there are more things, etc.  Can something that is weightless still somehow weigh less than something else weightless? After all, a negative number- a number less than zero- can be lower than another negative number, even though they seem like they shouldn’t exist at all. It’s a quandary: are all items lower than absolute zero equal, or is it possible to be even less than something that is nothing?

This line of questioning has nothing to do with trying to figure out if Carly Fiorina’s endorsement of Ted Cruz is more or less important than Johnny Damon endorsing Donal Trump.

(h/t BMK)

03.08.16
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Mississippi Bending: The Michigan Convergence

 

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Image via The Chicagoist and Seth Brown

 

If you were standing on the Lake Michigan’s eastern shores late this February, on a day unusually warm and clear for that bitter month, you would have seen the Chicago skyline, distorted and strange, rising up over the far horizon. Nearly 60 miles of lake separate these two shorelines, and visibility is essentially impossible. But due to a temperature inversion that caused a bending of light and water, the skyline rose up from the depths, grotesque and squat, but still visible, in a place where it manifestly should not be.

If you were to stand in the same place today and turn your gaze southward, you might see a similar, though distinctly more frightening illusion: that of the country folding in on itself, bending at some Mason/Dixon line of the national soul, and falling forward, imposing a grim Mississippi on Michigan. It isn’t just that the two states have primaries today. It’s that the vision of one of the parties is to create a deracinated owner’s paradise, the kind found in the south, and impose it on America’s working heartland.

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03.04.16
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Politicization and Privatization: Rubio Excuses Flint

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Good lord, you’d think if anyone knew the importance of an abundant supply of drinkable water, it’d be Marco Rubio.

The most interesting and enraging moment of last night’s debate- ok, except for the ridiculous juvenalia, which wasn’t so much a moment as a permanent state of affairs- was when the Fox moderators finally asked about the Flint water disaster. Only Rubio was brave enough to jump on it.  He defended Gov. Rick Snyder- whose complicity and cruel indifference become more clear by the day- praising him because “(h)e took responsibility.” Marco said, correctly, “I don’t think anyone woke up one morning and said, ‘let’s…poison someone.'”

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03.03.16
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The Whitest Knight

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At the bloody Democratic Convention of 1968, Paul Newman, Ralph Bellamy, and Dore Schary gave a tribute to Adlai Stevenson, the two-time nominee, and two-time loser to Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson was a decent man, a true liberal who rose above the venal party bosses both north and south, and who always seemed slightly detached from politics. The tribute to him was moving, gracious, a hallmark to his decency, and went completely unlistened to. There was chaos on the convention floor as anti-war delegates were being muscled out in a boss-driven rush to nominate Hubert Humphrey, a good man driven to extreme by proximity to LBJ and the war.  What’s more, there was madness on the streets, blood flowing in a police riot.  1956, the last year Stevenson ran, seemed light years away.

It’s easy to think about that when you see a relic from another time speaking today to try to save the Republican Party.

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