I was going to wait until he was done, but I can’t.
I despise this shallow man and everything he stands for.
He’s either:
A) a full blown socialist.
B) an idiot.
C) a lobotomy patient.
D) a liar
E) demented
F) full of shit
G) a hypocrite
H) Poorly raised by a delusional hippie Boomer
I’m going for the full combo, with supporting pictorial evidence for C. provided below.
I waited in the hotel lobby for my team to go catch a bite to eat. Mugabe came on and started to lecture everyone and I had to go outside to contain my rage.
Meanwhile a bus of young Norwegians pulled up – a local sports team here for a tournament – and they went inside and stood enraptured by the speech – mouths hanging open, spittle and drool pooling.
Their worlds will be shattered soon enough by graduation, not to mention the Tsunami coming. A massive undersea quake has occurred far off in a land neither they nor their Ubermensch can comprehend. The ground has fallen away and the water is rushing towards us all.
Sometimes, the angry voice is the more reasonable one. Anyone who doubts that, I’m sending ‘em your way.
It’s just amazing to me. Rep. Wilson is supposed to be embarrassed by his outburst last year. Now Justice Alito is suposed to have some ‘splainin’ to do. Huh. Obama/Wilson, Obama/Alito. What’s the common factor? Anybody? Bueller?
Mister Wonderful tells serial whoppers. There’s just no getting around it.
That’s not a lobotomy scar, those are antennae. Haven’t you ever seen “My Favorite Marxist”?
You aren’t finished with your alphabetical analyses, dear….there are ever so many more letters of the alphabet to go!
Austin summed it up for me. Well done, man.
His sell-by date is past, now. He’s still on the shelf, but the customers are looking for something a bit fresher and firm.
He is the ever-fresh, Gordon. The perma-firm. Like a Twinkie, or outer space. Or a Twinkie in outer space. There is no shelf-life in a vacuum
It took a year, but I’m finally grateful for my enemies.
Monty Pelerin, in the department of History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes:
Obama rode into Washinton as the new Roosevelt, but he will leave as the new Hoover.
I was too tipsy to finish the alphabet, maybe Lance will show up with one his snarky riffs.
Sometimes your enemies help light the way, James.
I thought the GOP response was pretty lame. Could we have some fire, people?
Trouble with fire, is that it will burn whoever holds it unless the torch handle is long enough.
Obama’s trouble is either that his handle is way too long, or else he thinks it is. Here’s a guy walking into his SOTU address to shore up his base, along with hopefully the “middle-of-the-road” people who don’t give two shits about democrats or Republicans and just want to see some “progress made.” What does He do? He hits all the poison-pen squares of Obama Speech Bingo…”there are those who say” straw men…”status quo”…”policies of the previous decade”…”caused this mess in the first place.”
Sen. Jon Kyl says, if Obama intended to reach out to Republicans last night, He failed.
I really have to hesitate condemning Obama’s knowledge of politics across the board. On average, He clearly has a whole lot going on. But a lot of times, people who are widely and legitimately respected as accomplished geniuses within a general discipline, are blind skullfuckingly clueless idiots within just a piece of that discipline and I think that’s what is happening here: When Obama shows up at a Xerxes/Leonidas meeting with philosophically antagonistic counterparts to hash out a compromise, He develops a sudden case of ADHD and cannot keep His mind on the task. The conversation appears to just drift right back to that central point of “only Me and My disciples are fit to rule and you other people are getting in My way.”
Republicans, on the other hand? They have no torch handle at all. If they criticize anybody for anything, they automatically get burned. And Daphne, I think it’s a little bit too soon to say whether that’s cowardice, or a simple and durable acknowledgment of reality. Republican says “Obama is a power-mad narcissist” and people automatically think “Ah…projection.” Obama says the same thing about Republicans, and of course that’s different. Holy Man enjoys a huge advantage here, even before the alphabet-soup “news” networks show up to tell us all what we’re supposed to think.
There was one positive to come out of last night’s Bo and Pony show — Pelosi didn’t have a single real orgasm. She was faking it all. Do you suppose the Young President is man enough to accept that?
Arrogant ill-disguised lady-boy
Beslubbering bladder leak
Craven lily-livered maltworm
Droning flap-mouthed measle-pock
Egregious-lying multi-faced bum-trumpet
Furrow-pated rat-jawed gum disease
Gibbering jive-talking street con
Hollow-hearted crowd-fawning maggot pie
Impertinent supercilious Keebler elf
Jealous clay-brained eel skin
Knot-brained thin-skinned dwarf-bowler
Lean-faced lisping street clown
Mocking clown-pants clerk
Night-crawling slime-trailing baitser
Overweening narcissistic gawd help us
Preening stick
Quarrelsome friendless nerd-loner
Recrudescent marxist mind rot
Shallow ha-penny Soros-whore
Tallow-faced smiling iniquity
Usurping unholy gangster-in-chief
Vanity-driven misanthropic emptiness…
Lance! Hie thee hither.
[Now what?!]
Yes, your tonnage.
What did you say?
I said, You’re into bondage.
No, I’m not, idiot.
Oh. Well, the joint’s starting to look rather Gothic, if you know what I mean.
I’m having a seance, tonight.
I always DID think you look like a spook of some sort.
What?
I said My sperm seem to be coming up short.
Well, give ‘em some Geritol.
Nah, I’ll just take em for a brisk walk.
*steals Mr de Boyles list for use in those O so casual conversations that need them*
I didn’t even watch it. It matters not to me what he reads off of the teleprompter. It is designed to sound “good” and hit on talking points we’ve heard over and over again.
If he says something I want to hear I assume he’s lying. If he sticks to his agenda script, he’s saying nothing new. Yes. That’s right. He’s damned if he does and he’s damned if he doesn’t with me. That’s not the way it started out. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt (out of dumb blind optimism hoping that perhaps I was wrong about him during the campaign.) But no. He has proven me right every step of the way, and actually, he has proven that I was too kind to him.
His speeches are performances. And frankly, I hate the “music”.
Watch what he does, not what he says — unless he’s off-prompter and feels he’s in a “safe” environment. That’s the only time you get to look under the veil of architectural rhetoric.
Lady Keith said it best:
A curse on dull and drawling Whig, the whining, ranting, low deceiver
With heart so black and lies so big, the canting tongue of clishmaclaver
As someone who has helped prepare briefs for the Supreme Court and watched them for years, I know one thing for sure. Obama’s attack on the Supremes will cost him!
Even Sotomayer was taken aback. She may or may not deserve the spot Obama spiked her into, but she at least knows the protocol. An open, partisan attack on the Supremes is just not done. In front of the press and everyone, especially not done. To do it when the robed ones are guests of the House at an occasion of state is an ugly deliberate insult to them, to the Constitutional separation of powers, and to all of us.
In the long run, this may prove to be one of his biggest mistakes. Pissing off the Supreme Court of the United States is not smart politics. With any luck, Obama has made some enemies for life there, and they have ways of making him pay. It’ll just hurt him more that his insult included a bare-faced lie and was clearly done for short-term political gain.
Arrogant, condescending fool, excusing our enemies and taunting his own tribal elders as well.
Did you see the photo of Rahm at the SOTU?
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y125/TheAnchoress/rahmsraptgazeatObamasotu-1.jpg
[highlighted by the Anchoress]
He’s the POTUS, for true, without the ‘TU.’
Rhamsputin
Damn that felt good to read. I thoroughly despise him, too. He IS an ignorant, arrogant, dangerous, ass. Thank you Sam Alito for mouthing the polite version of what you were thinking.
Daphne’s always wonderful.
More wonderfulness on the same topic here.
Daphne – I am suprised you feel that way about poor George Lopez.
He doesn’t make me smile either, Lawyerman.
Hell, at least Bush was funny while he was busy increasing spending, engorging the deficit, and instigating two miserably mismanaged wars.
Daphne – I agree, Bush provided entertaining incompetence while Obama has provided boring incompetence.
So right, you two.
We should’ve left Saddam right where he was. I’m sure he was getting ready to shape up & fly right. Just needed a little bit of time to learn how to be good.
I’m thrilled that we created another Islamist pisshole and Iranian puppet state, Morgan.
I think it’s going to work out just great for us.
I’m unclear on what exactly is to be preferred over this. Was it the sociopaths & rape rooms, or the penchant for grabbing this piece & that piece of a nuclear weapon every few years or so?
I’ve yet to see any evidence that Saddam had nuclear weapons or even the slightest capability to develop such weapons.
How did his rape rooms and sociopathic governance effect the security of America? He was a vile tyrant, but so what? There are lot’s of them running countries all over the planet and we’re not deposing their regimes.
Iraq is now a fundamentalist Islamic state and the majority of it’s “democratically” elected shia government are in bed with the Iranians.
I don’t see one benefit to America resulting from that expensive, misguided war. Considering our long standing and very real problems with Iran, I’d say we’re in worse shape.
I think you could see a benefit or two, Daphne, if you put your mind to it.
Which is not to say I don’t understand your point. I just don’t agree.
Don’t tell me you think he was building it for electricity?
He was a belligerent power plain & simple. He ruled by threat. His history indicates that if the continuation of his rule demanded backing up his threats, he’d back them up.
This whole “you must produce exactly the bag o’weed you described within xx hours after you invade” is straight out of what the Earl Warren court did to this country’s criminal system right before it broke down, and crime spiraled out of control. The propaganda war that was funded by Soros is nothing more or less than an attempt to do the same thing with our national security. I’m rather surprised to see a bright lady like you falling for it.
It’s all a red herring. Saddam Hussein needed to stay, or else he needed to go. And he needed to go. You certainly can’t say we jumped at too early of an opportunity and failed to give him enough chances, can you?
He built that shell to bluff the Iranians and it worked. Meanwhile the Iranians were actually developing nuclear weapon capability.
If you’re going to throw Soros funded agiprop into this discussion you shouldn’t neglect the Iranian funded Chalibi who worked the neocons into such a pro-war lather.
Invading because Saddam repeatedly broke the no-fly zone, fired on U.S. aircraft and played find the queen with the U.N. nuclear inspectors is legitimately debatable.
Arguing that we should have engaged in an eight year, grossly mismanaged, bloody war because he was a nasty tyrant, the Iraqi people deserved better government and our oil allies were scared is utter bullshit.
He did not have wmd, he was not funding al queda, he posed no direct threat to our country (with the exception of possibly disrupting our friendly oil supply) and he was serious wall against Iranian hegemony in the region.
We were scared after 9/11 and we made some serious and costly mistakes based on emotion rather than reason.
Which brings me back to democracy building and tyrants – who next? The list is long on potential targets, how about Yemen or Liberia? Saudi Arabia might be a good choice, they seem fond of supporting terrorists and suppressing their own people.
It wasn’t about finding a weapon that matched up to a slug in the wall at the scene of a crime. It was about dismantling a madman’s capacity to make war, which had been an ongoing opera of a power struggle between Iraq, the US, France and Israel for some three decades. Nobody really understood what motivated France until after the war when it was proven they were on the take through the U.N. Oil For Food “programme.”
If it was about matching a particular weapon to some crime that had taken place, it would’ve been about the Anthrax. But it wasn’t about the Anthrax, the alphabet-soup networks coordinated a news blackout on the whole subject the minute Tom Daschle’s office was given the all-clear. Fact is, to this very day the authorities haven’t found a suspect more likely than Iraq. Yes, every single theory that’s emerged about Iraq there’s always some nugget of a sound bite to instill some doubt. Some of them are even true! But that’s the way real “intelligence” is; facts do not slide neatly down straight chutes into organized, non-contradicted conclusions.
Every single argument against Saddam’s involvement, you’ll notice, comes down to “There is no evidence to indicate” followed by some hyper-specific variant of what was proposed. There are far fewer legitimate arguments against the generalities. Saddam dangerous — yes or no? It’s just risible and unsustainable to say no. Fact is, it was artificially controversial to do something about it for the reason that it was the first time national defense policy had so starkly contradicted Hollywood’s steady stream of income. Their penchant for pumping out America-bashing, military-bashing bullshit had made them overly dependent on box office receipts from around Champs-Élysées. The resulting propaganda drive was like nothing the United States had ever seen before.
I’m not saying it’s entirely illegitimate to debate it. But there were some pretty repugnant ramifications involved with leaving the asshole where he was, just as there were with removing him. And a balanced deliberation about it requires a careful evaluation of both, not just one.
North Korea’s regime is vile yet we didn’t go after them. And the call to arms against Saddam never urged as a primary concern the suffering of the population, it was WMD which simply wasn’t there.
Um, Mahons, your memory is failing you. WMD was a primary reason, but the suffering of the population was also a primary reason.
The lefty chorus would have us think that WMD was the only reason, but ’tweren’t so.
That’s because there is no clear (or murky) link between the domestic anthrax attacks and Iraq. Current reading on that subject points to one of two conclusions: we still have no idea who did it or the perpetrator was a foreign power that if named would cause an international incident. If there was the slightest inkling that Saddam was behind the anthrax, it would have been trumpeted as another nail in the coffin arguing that invading Iraq was the proper course of action.
I’m not convinced that there were repugnant ramifications for leaving that POS hemmed in as he was, not for our national security anyway – which should be the ONLY reason we go to war.
Who was Saddam dangerous to, Morgan? The Iranians for sure, UAE, Kuwait and SA possibly. His citizens shouldn’t have factored into the equation at all.
I do not subscribe to the idea that our troops, equipment and tax dollars should be used to alleviate the suffering masses across the globe who have the misfortune to live under bad government. I do not believe it is an American duty to build democracies in third world hellholes from the point of our gun.
I can not see one advantage that America has gained by invading Iraq. Thousands of our finest are dead or horribly crippled, countless tax dollars have been spent and we are not one bit safer from Islamic terrorist attacks as a result of spilling all of that blood and money. We have helped to create a fundamentalist Islamic state that is friendly to Iran, our arch enemy.
Tell me how exactly the American people have benefitted by this war? Because I’m not seeing the upside.
*******************************
If you’re going to make a case for invasion of states that definitively participated in 9/11, try this one on.
Hell, why not Pakistan? The Taliban were Benazir Bhutto’s personal creation. She educated them in madrassas, armed them to the teeth and sent them into Afghanistan when the warlords were fighting over Kabul after the Soviets lost.
Pakistan is still funding, arming and providing safe haven to Al Queda and the Taliban. The Taliban is an arm of the ISI. The ISI was directly behind the terrorist bombing in India. Pakistan has no intention of ever seeing Afghanistan stabilized and we’re in bed with that government up to our eyeballs.
Which is probably why McChrystal is a proponent of talks with the Taliban, which Karzai has been carrying out via the Saudis.
We need to stop dicking around over there or pull out.
Apologies to all, I seem to have lost my mind for a minute.
Even considering that we might invade a client-state, much less tell the truth about our flea ridden pet, one that has a vicious propensity to bite, is clearly un-American and insane.
These questions all get into a sort of third-state squishiness, and that’s due to some sloppy equivocating President Bush was doing. It’s not so much a testament to his way of doing things, it’s more like a Bush Dynasty family way of working with what’s called “political capital.” It’s worked out very well for them, although I disapprove of it personally.
And Daphne, if you want to start condemning that, I’ll get in line with you.
But the end result is that Mahons has it half right. The Bush administration figured out they could do some reaching-across-the-aisle (ugh, does this ever lead to good things) if they could sell the invasion on humanitarian grounds. This was a short-term success. It helped to demonize hard-left democrats who were opposed to the invasion as well as liberal loudmouths like Michael Moore.
But if you go back to President Bush’s address to the United Nations on 9/12/02 — the “Hey you guys better do something if you don’t want to be completely fucking useless” speech — you see a crystal-clear, bullshit free definition of the reason we had for going in. For several years previous it had been our policy to stick our head where the sun don’t shine, and take a “He’s perfectly wonderful when he isn’t drunk” approach to Saddam Hussein. Obviously, in a post-9/11 world, that makes no sense at all. And so the administration correctly highlighted the Hussein regime as an “eminent threat.” Liberal talking heads, reflecting the thick-headedness of their constituencies, promptly morphed that statement into an “imminent threat” and, true to form, jumped upon conclusion after conclusion never once looking back. And then during & after the re-election campaign of ’04 we had a new liberal talking point: “Lied to the country as a pretext for war.”
What the administration did, was tell people what they needed to hear as a condition for their support. When someone with a “D” after his name does that, it’s just expected. When someone with an “R” after his name does it it’s “lying.” There really shouldn’t have been anyone waiting to be convinced. The decision to leave Saddam where he was, would be now, and certainly was then, logically unsustainable. Hussein was a ritual manufacturer of national-security uncertainty, because that was his own method of self-preservation. His national security came at the expense of everybody else’s.
And so in the complicated patchwork quilt of all these semi-power nations acting in their own best interests, his potential as a loose cannon is fairly obvious. The details of that destabilization are not so obvious — they’re still not public knowledge. But a thirty-thousand-foot picture of how this would likely work, practically draws itself.
I don’t believe Bush lied, I think he trusted his advisors and tried to do his best for America. I think Bush was a good man serving in hard times, I’m not picking a bone with him personally, Morgan. I voted for him twice and (as Mahons can attest) vigorously defended the Iraq invasion for several years.
I was wrong and so was he.
You still haven’t (and neither has Gordon) told me how the United States is better off from this war.
I also don’t give a shit about Lefty talking points, their daft opinions don’t concern me.
Okay. For one thing, Turkey, Kuwait, the gulf states, SA and Israel now don’t have a troublemaker at their back door 24/7. Nor do we, considering we have a serious economic interest in stability in that part of the world.
And Saddam had been making trouble for some time, and would have continued to do so in ways we can only guess about. I don’t think the current situation in Iraq is as bad as Daphne describes. It’s certainly better for us than what was there before.
I wish we had had a better plan for the post-invasion period. I wish we had recognized the insurgency for what it was earlier, and found a good COIN general to fight it. It might not have helped, though. One of the things the locals seem to need is to see just how bad the AQ people are before they are willing to risk a little to fight them.
It may well be that the best thing we can do is bulldoze them back to their little patch of sand and keep them bottled up there. Certainly if you go back and look at what the British thought about Islam, it seems that’s the only solution that works. At least, it did until they got oil money.
Since we aren’t allowed to tell them that if they stick their head up, we’ll cut it off, it may be that we’re stuck with a series of petty little wars.
I tend to go along with Jerry Pournelle’s take on this – empire at its worst that could not be fought in a way that would permit success.
It’d have been better to make the entire region a clean slate – from several thousand feet – and pin that “hegemony” badge to our chest with pride.
To think…these “petty little wars” used to be solved with the price of a sniper’s round.
But Laura, that idea buys out of the nation building, be kind to savages, neocon mentality that we’ve been suffering under for several years.
Hail the Hegemony, that works for me.