2010: The Year In PREview

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Once again, here are our fearless predictions for the year ahead:

JANUARY: All eyes are on South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson during President Obama's State of the Union address, wondering if Wilson will stage a repeat of his ­infamous "You lie!" outburst. Unfortunately, all of the attention focused on Wilson allows rapper Kanye West to leap onto the podium, seize the mike and begin a long diatribe about Beyoncé's last album, before being wrestled to the floor by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

FEBRUARY: Orly Taitz, leader of the so-called "birther" movement, files yet another lawsuit in Federal Court challenging Obama's eligibility for office. This time, her evidence that Obama was not born in the U.S. consists of a birth certificate allegedly saying that he was actually born in 1968 on the planet Vulcan. Taitz is immediately granted interviews round the clock on every Fox News show. The other networks simply report that "questions and doubts remain" about Obama's Terran birth.

MARCH: White House party crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi appear in an "exclusive interview" with TV host Larry King. This is unusual because the couple were not actually scheduled to be on that night. "What can I say?" King shrugs. "I was expecting Brad Pitt, but they just walked in and sat down like they owned the place. So I interviewed them."

APRIL: Tiger Woods announces that, after extensive counseling, he and wife Elin Nordegren have reconciled and that they are now "more in love than ever." Two weeks later, Nordegren buys Stockholm.

MAY: Birther Orly Taitz's suit is ­dismissed in Federal Court when it is revealed that the alleged "Vulcan birth certificate" is actually scrawled in lipstick on the back of a cocktail napkin, and furthermore that the lipstick is, in fact, Taitz's own favorite shade. Taitz holds a press conference in which she denounces the ruling as "more evidence that the entire federal judiciary is in league with the criminal and corrupt Vulcan conspiracy." Glenn Beck immediately offers Taitz a permanent co-host spot on his show.

JUNE: The House begins work on a banking regulation reform bill. No one has actually read the bill because there is as yet no bill to read, but that doesn't stop conservatives from immediately denouncing it as "a huge socialist power grab that will destroy American capitalism as we know it." Liberal bloggers, for their part, immediately denounce the bill as "a massive corporate giveaway that will turn all power over to the corporate fat cats."

JULY: Sarah Palin posts on her Facebook page that the proposed banking reform bill "will result in the strangling of thousands of puppies. And my baby son Trig, also." The next day, the White House releases a four-word statement on the claim: "That's simply not true." Fox News commentator Sean Hannity immediately brands the statement a "Gestapo-like tactic" to "stifle dissent."

AUGUST: Fox News does a seven-part series on what it dubs "Strangle-gate," with "fair and balanced" commentary by Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and John McCain. When media watchers note that there are no liberals on the panel, Fox news execs indignantly assert that to them, John McCain is a liberal.

SEPTEMBER: Glenn Beck releases his latest book "AAAAAH! Obama's Going to Kill Us All! AAAAAAAH!"

OCTOBER: Following up the success of its wildly popular "Guitar Hero" series, video game maker Activision releases a flood of follow-ups including "Ukulele Hero," "Accordion Hero" and "Yodel Hero." Thousands of copies of "Accordion Hero" have to be recalled when Kanye West suddenly and inexplicably appears on the screen during the "expert" level of "Beer Barrel Polka" and begins raving about the new Mary J. Blige album.

NOVEMBER: After President Obama pardons the Thanksgiving turkey, he is immediately blasted by liberal bloggers who charge that this just shows that Obama has been "bought and paid for" by the poultry industry, while conservatives criticize the move because "Well, Obama did it, so it must be bad."

DECEMBER: The world is stunned when Osama bin Laden is finally captured by a commando team made up of Kanye West and White House party crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi. "Bin Laden was recording one of his video messages," a Pentagon spokesman reports, "when the Salahis walked right past the guards and Kanye grabbed the mike from his hand."

The thing is, whatever actually does happen -- it's probably going to be even weirder.

Happy New Year, all! (And thanks to Stephan and Bryce Lapping for letting me steal the "Accordion Hero" joke.)

Letters to Santa

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Dear Santa:

The past couple of months have been pretty rough, as I'm sure you've heard. I know you've probably put me on the naughty list, but I really do need a new 9-iron. And a new SUV. And probably a new house. Help me out here, Santa.

-- Tiger, Boca Raton, Fla.

(Note to Staff: You're doggone right he's on the naughty list. But what can I say? I'm just an old softy. The way Tiger's been living, though, what he really needs is a case of extra-strength penicillin. See if we can make that happen. And as for that 9-iron, send it to Gov. Sanford's wife, with instructions. -- S.)

Dear Santa:

Hiya! Sarah here. Todd and the kids and I have been just all kinds of blessed with good things this year, you betcha. But since you're right nearby and all (I can practically see your place from my house!), if you'd like to swing by on your way out to make your deliveries, what we could really use is

(Note to Staff: Looks like part of the ­letter got cut off. Where's the rest of it? -- S.)

(Note from Staff: Nope, that's it. She apparently quit in the middle of it. -- Hermie the Elf)

Dear Santa:

All I want for Christmas is for people to know what Barack Obama is doing to this country. He's just remaking it into a place that's a kind of a hybrid between France and Venezuela. He's taking the beacon of freedom and turning it into an apologetic, hey, what can you do for me, wannabe European, spread the wealth, socialist wonderland. So I want people to be afraid about the economy. And then I want them to invest in gold. That's just because I love America so much, and not because I'm a paid spokesperson for a company that sells gold. Really.

--Glenn, Fox News

(Note to Staff: This letter was nearly impossible to read because it was soaked with tears. Next time, can we dry it off before it gets to my desk? And send Glenn some new antipsychotic medication. Whatever he's taking now isn't working. -- S.)

Dear Santa:

Greetings from the Senate Democrats! We'll be sending you a Christmas list as soon as Joe Lieberman says it's OK.

-- Harry Reid, Washington, D.C.

(Note to Staff: Can we get Harry a spine? -- S.)

Dear Santa:

Merry Christmas -- yes, that's right, I said Christmas, whether you like it or not -- from the Republican National Committee. We don't care what you bring us, as long as it makes liberals angry.

-- Michael, Washington, D.C.

(Note to Staff: I'd say send them coal, but they'd probably just set fire to it and chuckle about how mad that must make environmentalists. -- S.)

Dear Santa:

We're extremely unhappy with President Obama. He's not giving us the single-payer health-care plan we wanted, he's sending more troops to Afghanistan when we wanted them all brought home, he hasn't pulled all the troops out of Iraq yet, he hasn't legalized same-sex marriage or repealed "don't ask don't tell," and he's not giving the big banks and insurance companies the whipping we think they deserve. In fact, we really don't see any difference between him and George W. Bush. For Christmas, we'd like the Obama we thought we were voting for. And we're not going to stop having tantrums until we get him.

-- The American Left

Dear Santa:

We're extremely unhappy with President Obama. He's trying to force a nationalized socialist health-care plan down our throats, he's not sending enough troops to Afghanistan, he's cutting and running in Iraq, he's promoting the Secret Gay Agenda, and he's trying to regulate the financial sector out of existence. Plus, he bowed to an old Japanese guy. What we want is ... well, we don't know what we want, but we're really really mad. And indignant, also.

-- The American Right

(Note to Staff: Send the president a big-screen TV. If the guy's managed to tick off both the Far Left and the Far Right this badly, he may just be doing something right. -- S.)

Joyeux Noël, y'all!

Despair

Do I wish the Senate health care bill had a public option? Yes.

Hell, I wish both the House and the Senate bills just said "fuck it, we're going single payer," but I knew that wasn't going to happen.

Do I wish the version of health care reform that seems to be coming out of this fight went further? Yes.

Do I think Joe Lieberman's an asshole who needs to have his committee chairmanship stripped from him and whose office space should be removed forthwith to a broom closet in the Senate office building? Oh, HELL yes.

Do I want any health care reform AT ALL killed because I don't get everything I want in this bill?

No.

I realize that politics is the art of the possible. If you can't get everything you want, you get everything you can get, and regroup to fight another day.

But that's a position, voiced by Nate Silver and John Podesta, that seems to draw the kind of vicious attacks and accusations of betrayal that remind me of the shit that got thrown by the wingnuts during the run-up to Gulf War II. Read the comments to those linked posts if you doubt me.

I took this crap for eight goddamn years from the wingnuts, I'm damned if I'll put myself out there and take it from my own side. It makes me want to punch someone in the face.

I'm also sick to fucking death of the "Obama's No Different From Bush!" bullshit that I'm hearing more and more.

In short, I'm beginning to hate these so-called 'progressives' as much as I hate wingnuts.

So I'm backing away for a while. No political posts from me, other than the newspaper columns. I may just post about books and weird stuff I find. I may just shut the whole blog down.

Comments are closed for this post. I don't want to hear it any more.

"Liberal" ABC News Carries the Water for the Wingnuts. Again.

ABC News apparently thinks that it's wrong to bring terror suspects to a proposed Supermax-type facility on US soil because, among the 240 convicted and suspected terrorists already imprisoned here:

One passed messages to his followers, and another seriously and permanently injured a guard during an escape attempt.

Oh, and the headline goes even further in promoting wingnut talking points: 'Terrorists Beat the System in Federal Prisons."

Oh, well, then. I guess we should just imprison EVERYONE convicted of a crime, state or federal, away from the US, because gang members and Mob figures have "beaten the system" by passing messages to their followers and several prisoners have attacked and injured guards.

THE STUPID! IT BURRRRRNS!

Liberal media, my ass.

XBox: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

Geekologie:

Apparently there's a downloadable XBox game that's supposed to teach you how to talk to girls. Which -- so let me get this straight: playing a video game....to learn how to talk to girls. Folks, you better put your foil helmets on, the universe is imploding.

That is either the funniest or the saddest thing I've read all year. I can't decide which.

They Never Learn

You would have thought that the recent craziness in the stock market, where a lot of folks lost their shirts, would have thoroughly buried the whole Bushian idea of privatizing Social Security. But you'd be underestimating the sheer blockheadedness of the American Right. In a recent interview,  SC's own wingnut Senator Jim DeMint

 talks of reviving President George W. Bush’s failed plan to partially privatize Social Security by having workers put a small percentage of the current levy in a personal savings account...But let’s review. As a Center for American Progress Action Fund report found, under a Bush-style privatization plan, a October 2008 retiree would have lost $26,000 in the market plunge. If the U.S. stock market had behaved like the Japanese market during the duration of that retiree’s work life, “a private account would have experienced sharp negative returns, losing $70,000 — an effective -3.3 percent net annual rate of return.” And this doesn’t take into account the full plunge of the stock market, which dipped below 7,000 in March 2009.

Fail? They don't know the meaning of the word. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

Mother of Mercy, Is This the End?

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Charles Johnson is trying to put me out of a job.

It doesn't seem so long ago that Johnson, the founder and editor of the right-wing blog Little Green Footballs, was a wingnut's wingnut. He was one of the ones who led the charge against Dan Rather after Rather's infamous story about George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard ­service (or lack of same).

He and his Little Green Footballers spent hours poring over fonts and something called "kerning" to justify their theory that the memos stating that Dubbya had used his Daddy's political connections to walk away from the Guard were faked because you could create something that looked just like them with Microsoft Word. Even though no actual experts ever declared the memos faked, Rather was fired over the incident for failing to verify his sources properly.

Johnson was also one of the founders of the right-wing online consortium Pajamas Media, which featured hard-right all-stars like Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, et al. He was fond of describing left-leaning public figures as "idiotarians," and if he didn't originate the term "Islamofascists," he was certainly one of the people who helped spread it.

And after the Republicans lost ­control of the House and Senate in 2006, it was the good Americans at Little Green Footballs who called for the politically impure parts of America to be purged by fire, with commentators saying things like, "I just hope the nuke attack comes soon. Let it be on the East Coast, where it belongs."

So it was startling, to say the least, when Johnson went online on Nov. 30 to explain, in his words, "Why I Broke With the Right." His reasons provide a textbook definition of the word "wingnut":

-- "Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism."

-- "Anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)."

-- Support for "anti-government lunacy," "conspiracy theories," and "raging hate speech."

-- "Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide."

And Johnson names names: Rush Limbaugh, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Glenn Beck, the "birther" movement, Sarah Palin -- pretty much the whole wingnut aviary. The American right wing, said Johnson, "has gone off the rails, into the ­bushes, and off the cliff."

Well, yeah. I mean, that sort of thing has given me material for more columns than I can count. What the heck am I supposed to do if more right-wing Republicans follow Johnson's lead?

What do I do if Sarah Palin comes out and says, "You know, I don't think Democrats are really friendly with terrorists. We have some honest disagreements, but gosh-darn it, we're all in the same boat here and all this talk about who's a real American and who's not isn't good for the country"?

How am I supposed to make fun of the Republicans if they actually start acting as if they have some sort of political philosophy other than "Everything Barack Obama does, right down to the mustard he orders on his burgers, is The Death of the American Republic, but everything's OK if you're a Republican"?

What do I do if Glenn Beck starts taking his medication and stops raving like Captain Queeg at the end of "The Caine Mutiny"? What's next? Wingnuts actually learning the meanings of the words "fascism," "socialism" and Marxism" and applying them correctly? It's almost too horrible to contemplate.

But then I read that some members of the Republican National Committee are trying to enact a conservative "purity test" into the party platform, under which moderate Republican candidates, or anyone insufficiently ideologically "pure," would be denied funding or support from the national party, and I realize that, in the GOP, the lunatics are still running the asylum.

I'll have enough material to be with you for a long, long time. I hope that makes you as happy as it makes me.