The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: lol of the week
The GOP 2016 Frontrunners Are Complete Jokes

The GOP 2016 Frontrunners Are Complete Jokes

In conservative “humor,” only the words “Joe Biden” elicit more laughter than “teleprompter” or mentioning “Al Gore” when it’s cold. Just his name makes Republicans giggle the way most of America would if we were watching Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin and Miley Cyrus attempt to pass the U.S. naturalization/citizenship test.

In actual humor, Joe Biden is a ’70s-style icon who is so American he perspires Budweiser all over the leather upholstery of his freshly waxed TransAm.

Thus when the vice president said he was likely to run for president in 2016, everybody smiled. But Republicans became giddier than a Romney after two Frappuccinos. Bill Murphy — who worked on the Romney campaign and is now on the staff of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — tweeted this:

LOL.

Biden is such a joke that he might as well run with a Twitter account that exists to mock Republicans. Instead of wit, this “joke” relies on a Pavlovian trigger that requires you to believe the subject is laughable before the joke is made. It’s the same mechanism by which any utterance of #Benghazi provokes right-wing outrage, just because it does.

But what the right doesn’t get is that to anyone who isn’t in the Fox Newsosphere, where anyone who upsets Democrats — from George Zimmerman to the Duck Dynasty guy — is a hero, there isn’t one GOP frontrunner who is taken even remotely as seriously as Joe Biden.

Need proof, Republicans?

Mitt Romney — star of a new movie about how he genially lost the presidency by 5 million votes — is leading the GOP pack in New Hampshire. This was a guy Republicans spent six years trying not to nominate and will only ever be the president of the Vladimir Putin fan club.

Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) has destroyed his position as the media’s favorite for the Republican nomination with a flurry of scandals that now have him doing damage control on his damage control. Bridgegate broke just days after the governor signed his DREAM Act as his first step toward an actual Republican campaign that flirts with centrism. And what did Christie’s head-fakes to the center — in between cutting services, defunding Planned Parenthood and cutting taxes on the rich — earn him? Few Republicans stepping forward to defend him.

Now, as head of the Republican Governors Association, Christie’s traveling the country, raising money and forcing Republican governors to change their schedules to avoid him. Who wants to be the guy standing next to him when the next scandal hits?

But let’s say he does recover. Now the GOP has a Romney with hollow support from the base, and whose chief qualification is yelling at teachers in public. And he would still be a better candidate than his nemesis Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who has disqualified himself from the presidency in so many ways that Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) lost track months ago.

Bloomberg‘s Jonathan Bernstein believes the senator’s non-interventionist foreign policy views will disqualify him from the GOP primary, despite the vast presidential campaign machine Paul inherited from his father. The Tea Party hero also inherits his father’s history of racist newsletters and connections to fringe groups that are now fair game, thanks to the way Paul has attacked Bill Clinton.

A sly politician with a gift for selling libertarianism to evangelicals using his devout anti-abortion-rights stands as common ground, the junior senator from Kentucky is selling his soul to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for some establishment support in 2016. But Paul’s willingness to employ an ex-neo-confederate shock jock points to his lack of viability at a national level. And while the vice president had a plagiarism scandal of his own, at least Biden wasn’t borrowing from Wikipedia.

But all of that is just noise compared to Paul’s real disqualification: his Medicare plan, which immediately raises the retirement age and turns the Medicare guarantee into something that resembles Obamacare, with seniors picking up much more of the costs.

This leads us to Jeb Bush, the business community’s new favorite candidate.

The older Bush is a fine campaigner but a squishier version of his brother George W., and has said he would raise taxes for the right deal. He’s changed his mind on immigration reform so many times he’s not sure what he believes. On top of his own wealth of ethical questions, the former governor of Florida would pursue the presidency with his last name being synonymous with economic ruin for most Americans.

Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) will likely fall below his promise of creating 250,000 jobs but billionaire funders love his ruthless cutting of the safety net, his passion for screwing organized labor and his devotion for lowering taxes on the rich. If he can avoid his own adminstration-destroying scandal, he’ll likely be a powerful contender to be 2016’s Tim Pawlenty with even less personality.

The process of elimination, which is a nice euphemism for how the GOP selects candidates, has led Mother Jones‘ Kevin Drum to call Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) the “odds-on favorite” to win the nomination. Just weeks ago pundits were saying the willingness of the chairman of the House Budget Committee to make deals with Democrats meant his goal was to be chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, not president. But he didn’t raise taxes and despite the fact that he’s in favor of slowing the growth of military pensions, he’s still the most popular politician with both the GOP base and the party establishment.

But his disqualification is even greater than Rand Paul’s, as the congressman is only known to most people as the guy who wants to gut Medicare. While GOP strategists say immigration reform is necessary for the party to win the White House, they underestimate how harmful their plans to change America’s favorite government program have been with the seniors they need to court to have any chance of winning the presidency. Watch this speech and remember why the Romney campaign had to hide its vice presidential candidate for the last weeks of the election.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) would be the most hated man in America, if most people knew who he was. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) probably won’t even be able to win his Senate seat again. Rick Santorum should be the GOP frontrunner as the runner-up in 2012. But he hasn’t won an election since 2000, when his fundamentalist policies were already dated. Mike Huckabee’s last win was in 2004 and has re-emerged as a party player by infuriating women. But it’s pretty safe to assume people don’t want to hear him talking about sex anymore.

There will be the Herman Cains and Donald Trumps who recognize that Republican politics is an excellent way to sell crap. And there will have to be a woman or two, especially if Hillary Clinton isn’t running. But unless it’s former Democrat and current governor of New Mexico Susana Martinez, who accepted Medicaid expansion, it will likely be someone of the caliber of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

You get my point. Biden could compete with any of these clowns and if you’re not sure of this, re-watch how he dehydrated Paul Ryan in their one debate.

And if you think Biden/@LOLGOP is such a joke, poll us against Christie/Cruz, Paul/Santorum or Huckabee/Bush.

I’ve been tested against a Republican congressman before and was leading him — because the GOP brand is that smelly. This embarrassment helped keep Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) out of a U.S. Senate race, I like to believe. And I’d love to help the GOP with a little natural selection again.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

David Vitter’s Unforgivable Perversion

David Vitter’s Unforgivable Perversion

When the “family values”-loving Mark Sanford (R-SC) won back his former seat in the House of Representatives after lying to his constituents, betraying his wife and then trespassing on that now-ex-wife’s home, many observers reminded us that evangelical Christians love a redemption narrative.

A core part of the fiery breed of God-fearingness shared by many on the far right is a belief in a “repentance for sin, being able to start anew, start afresh,” said Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.

And as we debate whether now-New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner — who never actually left his wife — will be forgiven by Big Apple voters the way Mark Sanford was forgiven by South Carolina’s 1st district, we often forget to include in the discussion American’s foremost forgiven sinner — a man who cast aside all aspersions of scandal and continues to serve in the Senate as if he had never besmirched his own name: David Vitter (R-LA).

In 2007, Vitter — a leading advocate of banning same-sex marriage and opening public meetings with prayers — admitted that he was a client of  D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfre. But he denied — nay, rebutted! — allegations that he’d also visited prostitutes in New Orleans. Then he said he was going to continue doing his important work in the Senate, despite the fact that much of America now knew that this law-breaking, cheating husband probably had a diaper fetish.

Vitter was easily re-elected in 2010 after running a campaign typified by what may be the most blatantly racist ad ever run by a member of the U.S. Congress:

(Who would dare welcome and feed the brown-skinned poor? You could get crucified for that.)

Since his re-election, the senator has mostly kept his head down except to verbally defecate on immigration reform, continue his generally corrupt ways and to take on the big banks — an issue so desperately in need of Republican support that even I was even willing to drop the diaper jokes.

But this week, Vitter revealed his real fetish with an amendment to this year’s farm bill that would ban certain convicts from SNAP, aka food-stamp benefits, for life. As David Dayen points out, “Cannily, the crime of soliciting prostitutes is exempted from this ban.”

LOL.

Targeting violent felons with lifelong punishment is the kind of thing no politician can vote against without fearing an ad that screams, “MARK PRYOR VOTED TO GIVE CONVICTED PEDOPHILE RAPIST MURDERERS FOOD STAMPS!”

“Some people say these are unsavory crimes, and I agree,” said Bob Greenstein, founder and president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Dayen. “But there’s a broader principle here. Suppose you did something terrible when you were 19, and you were straight the rest of your life, you paid your debt to society, now you’re 82 and living in poverty, should you be stripped of food stamps? Is this the right thing to do?”

“It doesn’t save anyone any money,” Timothy Smeeding, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, told MSNBC. “It just makes sort of a political statement that we don’t forgive people for crimes once they pay their dues. We’re just going to punish them forever.”

Forget about the idiocy of encouraging recidivism by forcing those who already have little chance of finding work to starve. What about redemption? Forgiveness?

Starting afresh!

Vitter’s amendment — which was unanimously accepted by the Senate — would punish both the ex-convicts and their families for the rest of their lives. And who would be most likely to be afflicted by such a law?

Here we get to the core of Vitter’s perversion. There’s only one sin those on the far right cannot forgive you for: being born poor.

The hostility to “food stamps,” the fictional “Obamaphone” — which Vitter also filed an amendment against — and Medicaid expansion all have one thing in common: the belief that “the poor” are ripping us off, bankrupting this country and would be better off if the government gave them nothing.

To believe this, you not only have to disregard much of what Jesus actually taught, but you have to ignore the sad fact that the best predictor of a child’s success in school is his or her parents’ wealth and education. You also have ignore the untold billions taxpayers spend subsidizing the richest, who argue with straight faces that capping IRAs at $3 million will somehow discourage saving.

The war on the poor or “excess Americans” — as the creator of The Wire David Simon calls them — is as sickening as it is convenient.

“We do not need 10-12 percent of our population; they’ve been abandoned,” Simon recently said. “They don’t have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.”

They can be abandoned, punished for life, encouraged to recommit acts that drive them back to prison, where they can actually make some money for a private corporation. But they cannot be forgiven. That right, that sacrament, is reserved for those who wear suits and ties during the day and diapers in the evening.

The Worst Allen West Quote Ever: LOL Of The Week

The Worst Allen West Quote Ever: LOL Of The Week

Does Allen West need to audition for Fox News, or was that what the last two years actually was?

Of course, before we really begin discussing the worst thing Allen West ever said, let’s note that the decent should hesitate briefly before mocking the soon-to-be former congressman from Florida’s 22nd district for two reasons.

First, West retired from the Army after being fined for “harsh interrogation tactics” while serving with the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq. You look at Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and see no excuse in her background for her callous fear mongering and fevered desire to legislate morality—except perhaps her marriage. You can reasonably assume that, like the victim of his interrogation, West may suffer from some sort of post-traumatic shock, a permanent fog of war.

That said, even more importantly, you have to wonder if focusing on their looniest toons only distracts from the calculated cynicism of the right and its billionaire funders. Or does it illuminate the extremism Republicans promise when given any sort of power? After Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, we have to assume the latter is more likely.

The far right are no longer pamphleteers and spit-ballers calling Eisenhower a “Commie” and accusing Kennedy of treason. They’re Republican candidates. In many ways, despite his questionable equanimity, Allen West is a perfect example of a Republican Party that can no longer tell the difference between governing and selling gold and emergency rations on AM radio.

Earlier this year, West told a town hall that “78 to 81” of his fellow members of Congress were members of the Communist Party. He followed that up with an op-ed in The Hill in which he didn’t back down from his claim. Instead he said he was trying to inspire “a passionate debate” and called the blustering AM radio demagogue Mark Levin an “esteemed scholar.”

West channeled former senator Joseph McCarthy perfectly when he asked, “What part of their agenda are they trying to hide?”

The assumption of guilt, the implication of defensiveness, the casual association with unspeakable horrors.

All of these were key aspects of McCarthyism and its blind attack on free speech and free thought. For decades after McCarthy’s censure by the Senate and rejection by his fellow Republicans, McCarthyism had been rejected by mainstream American society—then McCarthyism got its own news channel.

And about a decade and a half after the advent of Fox News, the right got its dream candidate in Allen West, who unapologetically called his colleagues “Communists” and no major voice in the Republican Party rose to rebuke him.

West has finally ceded his seat to Democrat Patrick Murphy, who defeated him in one of the most expensive congressional races in American history. This gave him the chance to voice his most deluded and inflammatory statement ever.

In an interview on NPR about his future plans, West ended by saying, “And always remember, Abraham Lincoln only served one term in Congress, too.”

LOL.

Since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, making allusions to the film has become a national pastime. In The Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus called the film “‪a political Rorschach test.‬”

CNN’s David Gergen looks at the ink blots of Lincoln’s complex campaign to pass the 13th Amendment and—unsurprisingly—sees that the president needs to compromise more.

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, author of Angels and Ages: Lincoln, Darwin, and the Birth of the Modern Age, sees the film portraying the 16th president’s exceptional steadfastness:

Lincoln was an uncompromising man who sponsored violence on a hitherto unimaginable scale; that he paid the highest price himself for the noble but hugely costly morality in which he believed is one of the things that makes his story still so fateful and, in its way, uncompromised.

(Ron Paul will probably skip the movie. But you probably wouldn’t want to know what he’d see.)

Apparently, Allen West looks at Lincoln and sees himself.

It’s easy to understand why Lincoln — at least in the North—is our most beloved president. Without his presidency, it’s difficult to imagine what this country would be like today. As the first Republican president, he enacted an agenda noted for progressive achievements, allowing both Democrats and conservatives to claim him. And no one person better exemplifies the American Dream of rising from nothing to become crucial to history.

Allen West would make more sense—and still offend people—by comparing himself to Alan Grayson, the one-term Florida congressman who is about return to Congress.

Grayson’s unabashed attacks on Republican morals won him derision from the right and the center. He said the GOP health care plan was “1. Don’t get sick. 2. And if you do get sick… 3. Die quickly.”

But unlike West, Grayson was a member of the 111th Congress, which racked up achievement after achievement—from preventing a Depression to reforming credit cards, student loans, health care and Wall Street to finally ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

West’s 112th Congress successfuly threatened America’s full faith and credit and set the record for voting to repeal a law they couldn’t repeal.

West would be lucky to follow Grayson’s unapologetic path back to Congress in two years.

Abraham Lincoln in his one term in Congress spoke out against the Mexican-American War. Allen West has compared Iran to Nazi Germany. Allen West calls Democrats “Communists.” Abraham Lincoln was elected as a moderate who was willing to keep the Union together—even, at first, with slavery intact… though he’d opposed the spread of the institution since his youth. Allen West told liberal leaders to “…get the hell out of the United States of America.” Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address, facing the dissolution of the Union, said:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

If Allen West looks in the mirror and sees the better angels of our nature, we should all have a mirror so kind.

When I look at Allen West’s future, I see only one thing: “Up next on Fox News, it’s Allen West’s Better Angels. He’ll be naming actual Communists.”

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr