The Mommie Dearest Republicans

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

You know, sometimes the over-the-top reactions of the right wing to the most innocuous actions or statements by President Obama remind me of a scene from a movie. Specifically, they remind me of the scene in “Mommie Dearest,” in which Faye Dunaway, playing actress Joan Crawford, goes into a complete screaming meltdown over the fact that she finds clothes on wire hangers in her daughter’s closet.

This week’s right-wing hissy fit comes in reaction to comments that the president made at the recent National Prayer Breakfast. After acknowledging the value of the meeting for “giving us the opportunity to come together in humility before the Almighty and to be reminded of what it is that we share as children of God,” and acknowledging his reliance on God’s guidance “not just in my own life but in the life of our nation,” Obama proceeded to go after those who would use faith either as a wedge or as a weapon.

“From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris,” he said, “we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it.” He made particular mention of ISIS “terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”

But, the president warned, lest we get too proud or vain, we might remember that “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Well, the only thing that drives the Mommie Dearests of the right crazier than the president speaking at all is him saying something that happens to be true. This time was no exception.

“The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, indicating that he (Gilmore) is either about 12 years old, or he really needs to get out more.

Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana used the time-honored right-wing tactic of just making stuff up. Obama, Rep. Fleming claimed, was saying that ISIS “are freedom fighters, just like the patriots of the Revolutionary War. And they’re no different; their service is just as honorable.”

Well, sir, I do know that they speak somewhat differently down in Louisiana, but to say that calling a group “a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism” (Obama’s actual words) equals “comparing them to the patriots of the Revolutionary War” causes me to doubt either your understanding of our native tongue or your honesty. For the record, I do believe Rep. Fleming speaks English.

Closely akin to the wingnut tactic of making things up that didn’t happen is the even more pervasive one of denying the existence of things that did. Such as the complaint of former Fox News host, Ted Nugent bassist and soon-to-be-failed presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who said that Obama could easily have defended moderate Muslims in his speech while condemning the radical extremists. Well, as we’ve seen above, that’s exactly what the president did, which Huck would know if he’d cared to read the speech. Or to tell the truth.

But for true hysterical hyperbole, you need to go to conservative activist and failed congressional candidate Star Parker, who told right-wing radio host Mark Levin, “Frankly, what the president did was verbal rape.” There is not a joke I could make about equating a speech at a prayer breakfast with violent sexual assault that would not be more offensive than the comparison itself. So I’ll just leave that one there.

Again, it is absolutely true, and widely accepted as such, that while great and noble things have been done in the name of God by adherents of all religions, terrible and brutal things have been done as well. Sadly, Christianity is not exempt.

To deny history and claim otherwise is nothing but pride and vanity, and while I haven’t been to Sunday School in a while, I seem to remember those being sins. I also remember something about bearing false witness. I’m pretty sure that’s bad, too.

It’s a pity that the supposed defenders of Christianity aren’t too good at practicing it, because they’re too busy playing Mommie Dearest and having dramatic conniptions over things most normal people take for granted.

Another Benghazi Fizzle

 The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion
Another month, another Benghazi fizzle.

It seems that the Raging Republican Right is trying once again to create an administration-destroying scandal by politicizing the tragic deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, during an attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.

Problem is, every new “bombshell revelation” they come up with turns out to be a dud.

The most famous one was the “60 Minutes” story by correspondent Lara Logan, in which a supposed eyewitness with a tale of personal derring-do and betrayal on that night was revealed within days to have been a fraud who’d told an entirely different story to his employers.

After that, you’d think the Benghazi Cult would be too embarrassed to even bring it up again. But that would assume that these people have the capacity for embarrassment. Caught spreading a lie, their reflex is to just yell the lie louder and look for a new one to spread.

They thought they’d found another “smoking gun” in the testimony of retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Lovell, who testified before Rep. Darrell Issa’s Kangaroo Court (aka the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee) that we “should have done more” to rescue the embattled ambassador and his staffers.

When questioned about what forces exactly were in place that could have reached the scene in time to save lives, Lovell took the Way of the Weasel: “The discussion is not in the ‘could or could not’ in relation to time, space and capability; the point is we should have tried.”

In other words, we should have tried something, even if we knew it wouldn’t work.

Nevertheless, Fox News immediately touted Lovell’s testimony as “incredibly damning.” At least until later in the day, when Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, specifically asked if Lovell was saying that “we could have, should have done a lot more than we did because we had capabilities we simply didn’t utilize.”

“That is not my testimony,” Lovell replied.

At that point, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, a California Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had to try to save the “Obama left them to die” narrative by throwing Lovell under the bus and impeaching the Republicans’ own witness.

“General Lovell did not serve in a capacity that gave him reliable insight into operational options available to commanders during the attack, nor did he offer specific courses of action not taken,” McKeon said. 

On the heels of that failure came another supposed bombshell, an email released by the White House from Ben Rhodes (no relation), whose job title is “deputy national security adviser for strategic communication.” In other words, he’s a spin doctor.

His job, like the job of such PR guys in every single administration, is to try to put the most positive face on things for the president he works for. So his email suggested doing just that. He suggested several goals for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice’s upcoming appearances on Sunday morning talk shows, one of which was “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

We now know that this assessment of the attacker’s motivations was incorrect, or at least incomplete. But we also know that the “attack as a reaction to the video” theory was based on actual assessments the CIA had sent the White House nine hours before the Rhodes memo. It wasn’t just made up out of whole cloth. It was wrong, but that’s the information they had at the time.

If your idea of a Great Scandal That Will Bring Down the Mighty is the revelation that a mid-level White House PR guy tried to do PR for Sunday morning shows that almost nobody watches anymore, using the information available at the time that came from the CIA — well, then, scandals just ain’t what they used to be.

What’s truly baffling and infuriating about all this that there’s plenty to criticize about what led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. There are legitimate criticisms about our lack of preparation and our failure to have more assets within striking distance to deal with a sudden attack in a volatile region. There’s also the excellent question of whether we should have even been in Libya in the first place (something, you may remember, that I wasn’t in favor of).

But that’s not sexy or dramatic enough for the Benghazi Cult. They’re twisting themselves in knots trying to find some kind of base betrayal on the night of the attacks themselves or some kind of cover-up afterward.

Once again, their Obama Derangement Syndrome blinds them to a legitimate problem, which is why their Benghazi narrative never gains any traction outside the right-wing bubble.

The Parrots Squawk About Obamacare (with commentary from the usual gang of idiots)

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

As I entered the shop, a string of bells attached to the door jingled to announce my presence.

The place was small and cluttered, with narrow aisles between shelves crammed with pet foods, aquarium gear, and cat litter. The air had a slightly rank animal smell.

A little old man with a wrinkled face and a fringe of white hair around the top of his bald head came out from the back, wiping his hands on a rag. “Welcome to GOPets,” he said. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw the sign, and I was wondering about it.”

He straightened up, beaming with pride. “We sell only genuine Republican pets to right-thinking individuals.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can pets have political parties?”

“Come on back and see,” he said. He led me to a back room, where a line of parrots sat on perches. “Our latest shipment,” he said. “These parrots are specially trained by hours of watching Fox News to expose the problems of Obamacare.”

“Really,” I said. “And what problems would those be?”

“Check it out,” he said proudly. He pointed at the nearest bird, which spread its wings and squawked, “No one’s going to sign up for Obamacare! Everyone hates it! RAWK! It’ll fail! RAWK!”

“Guess this little guy hasn’t heard the news,” I said. “Despite the problems early in the rollout, looks like they hit the target, and then some — 7.1 million enrollees as of April 1. And that doesn’t count the young people who got coverage on their parents’ insurance till they’re 26 or the people who got coverage through Medicaid expansion.”

“Well, how about this one?” the old man said. He led me to an orange and yellow bird that crowed, “The people who signed up for Obamacare aren’t going to pay their premiums! RAWK! It’ll fail! RAWK!”

“Actually,” I said, “that’s pure speculation, since most of the people who signed up recently haven’t even gotten a bill yet. And the places that have reported in so far — California and Vermont — say 85 to 90 percent of the people who have gotten a bill are paying, which is plenty enough to sustain the program. What else you got?”

A green and yellow-striped bird called from a nearby perch. “People lost their coverage! Obama lied! RAWK!”

“Some people lost their old coverage because their plans were lousy and didn’t meet the minimum standards set by the ACA,” I said. “But Obama didn’t cancel them, the insurance companies did — and then most replaced them with new, compliant policies. And every single one of the ‘Obamascare’ news stories about people losing their coverage turned out to be bogus.

“When news organizations got off their butts and investigated rather than just repeating the scripts of attack ads, they found out that these fake ‘victims’ were ignoring the fact that they could have gotten cheaper, better insurance through the Exchanges, or that they were actually paying lower premiums and ignoring the cap on out-of-pocket costs. Fact is, millions more are now covered than were before.”

“Cooking the books! Cooking the books! RAWK!” a nearby blue-feathered bird piped up.

“Let me guess,” I said, “back during the election, this bird was squawking about ‘skewed polls,’ right?”

He looked stunned. “How did you know?”

“They’re nothing if not predictable. And how’d that work out for you?”

As I spoke, I spotted one grizzled old bird whose feathers were ragged and faded. As I approached, he looked at me balefully with an eye filmy with age.

“I’m not a parrot,” he said in a croaking, pitiful voice. “The Democrats are the parrots. They’ll never criticize Obama. Rawk.”

“Wow,” I said, “that’s an old one, all right. Delusional as well. … So is anybody buying any of this?”

“Not as many people as used to,” the old man said sadly. “If it wasn’t for the news media repeating everything the parrots say without challenging it, no one would know about them at all.”

He began to cry. “I’m ruined,” he said. “All the talking points my parrots have learned are useless.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “There’ll always be some who’ll listen to a lie over and over and believe in it even after it’s debunked.”

A mynah bird in the corner stretched its wings and threw back its head. “BENGHAAAAAZI!” it hollered. “OBAMA LIED, PEOPLE DIED! CAW!”

“See what I mean?” I said.

The old man smiled. “I feel better already.”

I sighed. “I wish I did.”

THE PARROTS SQUAWK BACK: 

Perennial anonymous coward fugitiveguy, commenting as he does every week on the Pilot website: 

Dusty would be right at home on a comedy central roast. Anyone who feels that the needless death of 4 brave Americans including the first ambassador killed in 3 decades is fodder for faux humor just to file a column would be in good company. I don't think it was just the string of bells that announced your presence.

This is a pretty frequent tactic of the wingnuts: make fun of their desperate attempts to create an Administration destroying scandal out of the Benghazi tragedy, and they cry all sort of crocodile tears about how you're mocking the dead. So let me make it clear: I'm not mocking the dead, dim-bulb, I'm mocking people like you. Hope this helps. 

Then there's my old pal Frank Staples aka "skylinefirepest", who posted this gem: 

Dusty, you're turning into a brazen liar trying to defend your idol's defenseless crapola. Your parents would not approve!

Frank's comments  constantly invoke my parents, because like most wingnuts, he's an asshole with no sense of boundaries. 

Actually, Frank, my mom tells me quite often how she likes my columns. She's told me she thinks you're a jerk, though. 

My favorite, though, is this one, from anonymous cowards "JK": 

Does anyone read Mr. Roades' [sic] columns.... certainly not me!

Gotta  love the idiots who spend time commenting on something they say they never read. 

The "You Worship Obama" Meme Explained

Recently, one of the more persistently idiotic right wing commenters on the Pilot Website exploded with one of those angry, bitter diatribes that exemplifies one of the more baffling cliches from the land of Wingnuttia:

There is nothing [Obama]  could do that would have them to speak ill of him. They would sooner have their tongues cut out. Liberalism is their religion and Obama is their deity.

This "leftists worship Obama  and never, ever criticize him" bullshit comes from people who have clearly never met any actual leftists. Read Glenn Greenwald, Firedoglake, a goodly portion of the posts on DailyKos, Americablog...there's been plenty of criticism of Barack Obama for not being liberal enough, not pushing for a public option in the health care law, for not being tough enough on bankers and Wall Street, for drone strikes and kill lists, etc. etc.

 But it's an article of faith on the right that Obama never gets any flak from the left, and by "article of faith" I mean "something that they believe despite a complete lack of real world evidence."

I never have been able to figure out why they cling to this particular lie so bitterly. After all, you'd think they'd be searching for liberals angry with Obama. I remember there used to be a right wing meme called "even the liberal," as in "even the liberal New York Times thinks Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." But now that a center oh-so-slightly left President is in the White House, they blithely ignore all the criticism he gets from disappointed actual  leftists in favor of this fantasy that "all you liberals blindly worship him."

I think I've finally figured it out. As far back as the 2012 primaries, the far right backed one kindred spirit after another: Cain, Bachmann, Santorum, et. al. and they all imploded.

Finally, they got Mitt Romney. No one really liked the guy, on the left or the right. But for some reason, they thought he was "electable", and that's all that mattered. To them, anyone would be better than the Muslim Marxist Kenyan Usurper.

And that's why they get so furious at the idea that anyone actually likes Barack Obama. They're bitter and jealous that some of us got to vote for a candidate we actually like.

Wingnuts Punk'd Again

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You know, I've never really been a huge fan of former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel. I don't dislike him, mind you; he's just never been someone who excited me all that much.

He does get a lot of respect from me for being one of the first Republicans to buck his party and point out that George Dubbya's Wacky Iraqi Adventure was turning into another Vietnam. But when I found out that President Obama was nominating him for defense secretary, my reaction was, and I quote: "Meh."

What I saw of his confirmation hearings didn't stir up any more excitement. But, as so often happens with politicians in the Washington monkey house, I find myself rising to defend him, not because of his own merits, but because of the people attacking him and, more importantly, the way they go about it.

First, the Israel Lobby tried to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic for pointing out that there actually is such a thing as an Israel Lobby. Then Lindsey Graham announced that he intended to filibuster Mr. Hagel's nomination - the first time this had ever been done to a secretary of defense nominee - in a snit over the fact that, after hours upon hours of hearings, the only result of Republican attempts to create a "Benghazi-Gate" scandal has been to make former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the most popular politician in the country, according to the Quinnipiac University Poll taken afterward.

Of course, Hagel had nothing to do with the Benghazi killings or the State Department, but let's not let that get in the way if Lindsay Graham's got some tantrumin' to do!

But for true crack-brained right-wing attacks, you've got to go to the Internet loony bin known as Breitbart.com.

After the death at an early age of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, some wondered if the muckrakers at Breitbart.com (who became famous for shamelessly doctored and deceptively edited "expose" videos of ACORN and Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod), would fade away. Sadly, it seems that the perpetually apoplectic Mr. Breitbart may have actually been a moderating influence, which should give you an idea of the level of crazy we're dealing with here.

On Feb. 7, a headline at Breitbart.com blared, "SECRET HAGEL DONOR?" The story, written by "editor at large" Ben Shapiro, claimed that the administration was refusing to turn over documents about possible foreign sources of funding for Hagel because one of those was a group called "Friends of Hamas."

Given the mainstream media's penchant for taking any unsourced and sketchy Breitbart.com story and running with it without bothering to check it out (See "Sherrod, Shirley," above), it's probably a miracle that this didn't blow up into another one of those scandals where the accusations turned out to be hollow, but not before they nearly destroyed people's lives and careers.

In fact, reporters began asking people like Mike Huckabee what they thought about the story, while never actually bothering to ask whether the story they were asking for comment on was true. But what does that matter? Friends of Hamas "has a ring to it," in the words of Lou Dobbs.

Well, the name may have a ring to it, but once again, there's no bell. No one - not the State Department, not the Treasury Department, not any reporter who stirred himself or herself long enough to do a simple Google or Lexis search - could find any record of any such group ever existing.

There's a reason for that: It was a joke.

On Feb. 19, New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman wrote in an op-ed that the "Friends of Hamas" reference came from a mildly sarcastic hypothetical question he'd asked an anonymous Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.

"I asked my source," Friedman wrote, "had Hagel given a speech to, say, the 'Junior League of Hezbollah, in France'? What about 'Friends of Hamas'?"

He had no idea that anyone would take the names seriously. They were "so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear he was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed."

No one, that is, except a pack of right-wing pseudo-journalists with axes to grind and not enough journalistic ethics to even pretend to try to find corroboration, so long as the story has a "ring" to it.

Worse, they don't have the sense to recognize sarcasm when they hear it. That's why the right, once again, has egg on its face.

It's been said (either by Joseph Conrad or Doctor Who) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. Given the sorry state of Mr. Hagel's enemies, I hope he does get confirmed.

SWORS: A Deadly Epidemic Returns

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An epidemic is sweeping America. It has visited us before, but this January it’s come early and this strain appears to be particularly virulent, even dangerous. 

Oh, you thought I meant the flu? Well, yeah, that’s bad too, but what I’m talking about here is another outbreak of SWORS: Spasmodic Wingnut Outrage Syndrome. 

As you regular readers know, SWORS is a disease of the central nervous system particularly prevalent among members of the American right wing. SWORS sufferers experience a significant degradation in upper level brain function, leading to a near-total loss of any sense of proportion. They become prone to manic outbursts of indignation and rage over trivial or even imaginary events.

The latest outbreak can be traced to a remark made by Vice President Joe Biden while speaking about the plan he was working on to curb gun violence in the wake of the horrific school shootings in Newtown Connecticut. Part of the plan, Biden said, might include “executive orders” by the President, actions taken under the power of his office that didn’t need to be voted on by Congress. 

Now, anyone who knows anything about this country’s Constitutional separation of powers would realize that what can be done purely by executive order is limited, and certainly do not include a blanket ban on semi-automatic weapons or high capacity magazines. You can at least rest assured that Barack Obama, a former Constitutional Law professor, knows this. This did not stop SWORS sufferers from immediately concluding that “the plan might include executive orders” meant that Biden was actually saying “OBAMA’S GONNA TAKE ALL YOUR GUNS! BWAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!”

Reaction followed the classic pattern of SWORS, including overly dramatic public statements of irrationally disproportionate anger. Washed up rocker and gun advocate Ted Nugent claimed gun owners were going to be “the new Rosa Parks.” Tennessee resident James Yeager, CEO of a company that trains people in “tactical skills” and who has an online shop selling “tactical” equipment, put up a YouTube video in which he stared into the camera with what I suppose was supposed to be a look of fierce determination but actually more closely resembled psychotic rage. 

“I’m not [bad word] putting up with this,” Yeager snapped during a profanity-laced tirade. “I’m not letting my country be ruled by a dictator. I’m not letting anybody take my guns! If it goes one inch further, I’m going to start killing people.” The state of Tennessee promptly suspended Yeager’s gun permit. Hint: when you go on YouTube loudly announcing that you plan to start killing people, don’t get all surprised if the state acts like you might be serious. 

Yeager later apologized. According to the Huffington Post, he stated "It's not time to shoot anybody," while sitting next to a lawyer (who no doubt, wished fervently that Yeager had come to him before openly making terrorist threats on the Internet).

When the proposed plan was revealed on Wednesday, the “executive order” provisions had nothing on confiscation or banning of any guns. They promised that the Executive Branch would, among other things, “nominate an ATF Director"; “develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education," and "issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations." Any  limitations on types of weapons or high capacity magazines would be left to the Congress, although the President did call upon the Congress to enact those, which given the makeup of the current Congress, is a pretty long shot, so to speak.  Expansion of the background check requirement to include gun shows stands a better chance, but the President still left that up to Congress, while issuing executive orders that would make information more readily available for those. 

 Hardly the sort of stuff to send the citizenry to the barricades. Sadly, however, another symptom of SWORS is the inability to hear what someone has actually said. Instead, the SWORS victim reacts to a voice which apparently only they can hear. Republican representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, for example, demanded that the Obama Administration “enforce current laws,” apparently not noticing that some of the executive orders called for just that: they require  that the government “maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime” and “require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.” RNC Chairman Reince Preibus called the plan an “executive power grab,”  while failing to specify a single one of the executive orders that does not fall squarely within the President’s Executive authority. 

Sadly, there is no known cure for SWORS, since it renders its victims incapable of logic or persuasion. Even more sadly, it’s not just the infected person who suffers. It’s all of us. 

A Night Of Blown Chances

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For Obama supporters, Wednesday's debate was a frustrating exercise as we watched the president let one easy pitch after another go by him without taking a swing that could have let him hit the ball out of the park.

For instance, during the debate over taxes, Mitt Romney continued to make his absurd assertion that he could make his plan to lower tax rates "revenue neutral" by eliminating unspecified "loopholes and deductions." Obama could have turned to him and simply asked, "So which of these deductions and loopholes do you plan to close, governor?"

In the past, Romney has tried to weasel his way out of answering this question, saying only that he'll have to "negotiate with Congress on that" (in other words, we have to elect him and pass his tax reform bill to see what's in it). But nonpartisan tax policy analysts have stated that the only way to make up the revenue would be to eliminate popular tax breaks like the deduction for home mortgages and the child care tax credit.

President Obama did bring up that study, and made a reference that the "arithmetic" didn't add up, but when Romney intimated that his "plan" didn't include eliminating those middle-class tax breaks, he failed to press him to be specific. Romney hates being specific, largely because the more specific he and Ryan get about what they really want to do, the more horrified voters become.

Likewise, the president missed an opportunity to point out Romney's hypocrisy on the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. "The president should have grabbed that," Romney said. But Obama could have easily pointed out that Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, voted against sending the final proposal of the Simpson-Bowles commission to Congress. "Their proposal is a serious and credible plan, but I cannot support it," Ryan said at the time. Obama just let that one go by.

On health care, President Obama forgot the wise words of Sun Tzu that the best policy in waging warfare is to "attack the enemy's strategy." Mitt Romney's strategy is based entirely on lying through his teeth.

Remember, this is the campaign that said they weren't going to let the fact checkers dictate to them, and Obama let him get away with some whoppers.

For instance, Romney hearkened back to Sarah Palin's mythical "death panels" when he talked about "an unelected board that's going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have."

But as fact checkers, including The Associated Press, have pointed out, the health care law "explicitly prohibits" the Independent Payment Advisory Board "from rationing care, shifting costs to retirees, restricting benefits or raising the Medicare eligibility age." So the board doesn't have the power to dictate to doctors what treatments they can prescribe.

Romney also continued to double down on the thoroughly discredited claim that Obama is "cutting $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare." As the fact-checking site Politifact points out, Obamacare "does not literally cut funding from the Medicare program's budget." They go on to say that "the cuts are from future spending, not the program's current budget" and that 'the spending reductions were mainly aimed at insurance companies and hospitals, not beneficiaries."

This has been debunked so many times by so many fact checkers that for Romney to keep bringing it up is an act of sheer outrageous chutzpah, but I can't imagine that, as commentator David Gergen put it, Obama was caught by surprise by Romney telling a bald-faced lie. And that is exactly what it was.

Romney wasn't expressing opinions upon which reasonable people can disagree. He said things that were factually untrue, and the president let him get away with it.

I don't know what this was all about. Maybe Obama went into this debate assuming he could coast on the lead he has in the swing states. Maybe he thought going for Romney's throat (metaphorically, of course) would look "unpresidential."

He may have thought Romney would do the job for him by saying something egregiously stupid, like dismissing half of the American people again (another thing he inexplicably failed to mention). Maybe he was just unhappy because he was having to do this on his anniversary.

But Obama needs to get his head back in the game here. You give Mr. Etch A Sketch the chance to weasel and lie, he'll take it. Please, Mr. President, don't let it happen again. Next time Mittens serves up a slow pitch, you need to pound it over the left-field wall, then go upside his head with the bat.

Metaphorically, of course.

Insanity Is The Most GENEROUS Explanation

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Thirty-three times in 18 months.

 That’s how many times the Republican-controlled House has voted to repeal all or part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they call “Obama-care”), even though they know that such a measure is doomed to fail in the Senate.

Even if such a bill through some miracle managed to somehow survive the Senate, it would certainly be vetoed by President Barack Obama. The most recent vote came this past Wednesday.

I’ve often said that a key quirk in the wingnut psyche is the absolutely unshakeable conviction that if something fails repeatedly, it’s because they just didn’t ram their heads against the wall hard enough. “The economy crashed despite big tax cuts? That just means we need more tax cuts to grow the economy!” And so on.

There’s a fine line between perseverance and insanity, and Cryin’ John Boehner and his merry band of fools crossed that line so long ago that they can’t even see it in the rearview mirror anymore.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this wasn’t some form of mental illness on the part of the Prince of Orange and his crew. There are some cynics who say that the Republican leadership knew the measure, like the 32 before it, was doomed to fail. There are some who even say that the whole thing was a political stunt.

They say the whole thing’s a ploy to get House members staked out on their positions on the health care reform bill so that those votes could be used against them in the upcoming election, when those impressive voiceover announcers who only seem to surface at election time will be intoning “Congressman Schmendrick voted with Obama” with the type of voice-of-doom gravitas that suggests that they equate that voting record with unqualified support for child molestation.

But that’s hard to believe, don’t you think? I mean, that would make the Republican leadership seem like a bunch of completely politicized hacks who would take one of the 42 remaining days they’ve allotted themselves until the end of the year to address the people’s business and use it for the sole purpose of creating sound bites.

That would be a crassly cynical act by a party that’s decided to abandon the idea of addressing any real progress on jobs, immigration, national security, energy independence or any substantive issue at all, a party whose one and only priority is not governing, but winning.

That can’t really be it, can it? I mean, I know that’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said was his party’s “No. 1 priority” a while back, but he was joking, right? Because that would make them seem pretty useless to the average American.

No, I’ve got to go with insanity here. Another indicator that the Republicans are suffering from some sort of mental breakdown is the things they say about the ACA that are completely divorced from the reality of the actual bill.

Quotes like Mitt Romney’s assertion that “Obamacare puts the government between you and your doctor.” Or his claim that “Obamacare means 20 million American will lose the health insurance they have and want to keep.”

Or the oft-repeated claim, most recently seen in an ad from one of those shadowy anonymous SuperPACs attacking Florida Sen. Ben Nelson, that the health care law’s cost will be $2 trillion, “double what we were promised.” Or the claim from Florida Gov. Rick Scott that a company with 20 employees “could go out of business” because of the law’s requirement to buy insurance (even though companies with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from that requirement).

All of these assertions have been rated “false” by the nonpartisan fact-checking site Politifact. The “business with 20 employees” canard from Scott was given the lowest rating for truthfulness: “Pants on Fire.” And yet Republicans keep repeating these and other proven falsehoods over and over and over again.

Now, some people would insist that that means they’re all a pack of liars who have such complete contempt for the American voter that they think you’ll believe anything.

To believe they’re not seriously delusional would mean that they believe, as Adolf Hitler stated in “Mein Kampf,” that “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility … for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world.”

And that can’t be right. They can’t really think that way. Can they?

Romney Shaking That Etch a Sketch Just As Hard As He Can, To No Avail

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Last week, conservatives of all stripes were handed a great big steaming pile of disappointment when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") was constitutional. In particular, the Supremes upheld the "individual mandate," which requires most people to buy insurance or pay a penalty.

The reaction was pretty much what you'd expect from the unhinged right, for whom Obama Derangement Syndrome is the new normal. There were calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Someone briefly changed Roberts' Wikipedia page to brand him "Chief Traitor of the United States."

Former Michigan GOP spokesperson Matt Davis went even further: "[H]as the Republic all but ceased to exist?" he wrote on the Michigan Capitol blog. "If so, then is armed rebellion today justified?" When pressed for clarification, he refused to back down: "You can't have people walking with lattes and signs and think the object of your opposition is going to take you seriously. Armed rebellion is the end point of that physical confrontation."

Later, however, he did amend his remarks to say he'd "take out the part about armed rebellion." Whew. Good thing. Else someone might think the right wing was made up of, you know, radical traitors.

Some conservatives did paw through the wreckage of their hopes for a black eye for the president, trying to salvage something. They found it, or so they thought, in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion that, while the mandate could not be upheld as an exercise of the Constitution's Commerce Clause, it did fall within their power to levy and collect taxes, because of the penalty provision. They seized upon the idea of a "tax" and began waving it about with glee.

"The biggest tax increase in the history of the world!" trumpeted Rush Limbaugh. (Wrong, as usual. As noted by numerous sources, even if you accept it as a tax, it comes in 10th in U.S. history, behind Bush the Elder's 1990 tax increase and far behind that of Saint Ronnie Reagan in 1992.)

But calling the mandate a tax increase, while it handed the Republicans in Congress a new talking point, handed their presidential candidate a ticking time bomb. Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts, which he's on video touting as a model for the country, contained a nearly identical health insurance mandate. But Romney's insisting he didn't raise taxes in Massachusetts.

So, when campaign spokesman Eric Fehnstrom (who gave us the notorious "Etch A Sketch" quote) told NBC that Mitt "disagreed with the ruling of the court. He agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia, which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax," he really didn't have any choice.

Or did he? If you're Mitt Romney, you always have a choice, if you regard directly contradicting what you just said as a choice. Wednesday, Mitt raised that Etch A Sketch above his head and shook with all his might to try to wipe out his campaign's stated position of the day before.

"While I agreed with the dissent," Romney said, "that's taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said it is a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There is no way around that."

Now, one could view this not as a contradiction, but as a nuanced statement that Romney still doesn't think it's a tax, but that it's legally one now, so we have to live with that. But that hands Romney another set of problems:

First, Republicans don't do nuance. Nuance is what they beat John Kerry to death with in 2004. The second problem is similar: The rubes, racists and rageaholics of the Republican base hate the president so much, they will completely disregard anything Romney says or does and pull the lever for him anyway.

Romney could kill a kitten with a hammer at the podium during a campaign stop and by nightfall, right-wing bloggers, Republican talk radio and Fox News would be flooded with pundits insisting the kitten had it coming, and it'd be an article of faith among the Rabid Right by the weekend.

But to independents and undecideds, saying, as Romney did in a CBS interview, "It wasn't a tax when I did it, but it is when it's in Obamacare," makes you look like a weasel. Romney is just that, of course, but this particular act of weaseltude may be the one he can't wiggle away from.

If Romney Ads Just Told the Truth

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The 1990 movie "Crazy People" stars Dudley Moore as an ad executive who suffers a nervous breakdown and starts writing ads based on honesty about what the products are really about.Ads like: "Metamucil: It Helps You Go to the Toilet. If You Don't Use It, You'll Get Cancer and Die." And "Jaguar: For Men Who'd Like [sex] From Beautiful Women They Hardly Know."

After his bosses have Moore's character committed to an insane asylum, the ads accidentally get released to the public and become runaway hits. The bosses, after finding out that they can't replicate Moore's success, turn to him and his fellow inmates to create ads for the new "honesty in advertising" craze.
I think about that movie a lot when watching political ads. I wonder what would happen if "honesty in advertising" took hold in the Romney campaign:

VOICEOVER: Mitt Romney. Some liberals call him a flip-flopper. He was for a path to citizenship for illegals, then he was against it. He opposed amendments to define marriage as between one man and one woman, then supported them. He supported a universal mandate for people to buy health insurance, then called it socialism. He said he was a moderate "through and through," and now he says he's "severely conservative." Sometimes, even he can't remember what his positions are.

ROMNEY: "I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."



VOICEOVER: But there's one thing Mitt Romney is consistent about and always has been. He's a Republican. Barack Obama isn't a Republican. So there.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Vote for him. Because he's the Republican.

ROMNEY: I'm Mitt Romney, and I approved this message. At least for now.

Or how about this one:

VOICEOVER: Some liberals say Mitt Romney has a problem with the truth. He's claimed that Barack Obama didn't say it was unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and that military options were still on the table.

OBAMA: "When I say we're not taking any option off the table, we mean it. ... I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

VOICEOVER: He's claimed that his position on the auto industry bailout was "exactly what President Obama followed." But in 2009, he wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times urging lawmakers to "let Detroit go bankrupt."

VISUAL: Picture of newspaper headline: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt by Mitt Romney."

VOICEOVER: He claimed that Barack Obama never mentioned the deficit or the debt in the State of the Union Address when he mentioned it six times.

VISUAL: Clips of President Obama talking about the deficit and the debt in his Jan. 24, 2012, State of the Union Speech. Fade to the Politifact website's "Pants on Fire" symbol.

VOICEOVER: But there's one thing you can trust about Mitt Romney: He, you know, looks like you. And Barack Obama is ... well, you know.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Vote for him. He may be a liar, but he's not ... well, you know.

ROMNEY: I'm Mitt Romney, and I approve of this message. If you don't, then you're just calling everyone racist who doesn't agree with you.

Or this:

VOICEOVER: Some liberals, like the ones who write The Wall Street Journal's "Market Watch," say that Massachusetts under Mitt Romney was 47th in the nation in job creation. That during his tenure, Massachusetts' job growth was at 0.9 percent, far behind the national average of more than 5 percent. Some other liberals have said that Romney's top economic adviser has said that outsourcing American jobs to other countries is a "good thing." Meanwhile, under President Obama, we've had two years of positive job growth after suffering massive losses under the last Republican president. Liberals say these things, and ... well, yeah, they're true. But you should ignore all that and vote for Mitt Romney anyway, because he knows how to create jobs. Because he says he does.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Never mind the facts. He'll create jobs this time. Really.

This is, after all, the essence of the messages I keep hearing from so-called conservatives turned born-again Romneyites: "Yeah, we don't really like him, but he's not Obama." Why not be up front about it?

The Romney Standard of Truthfulness

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"I like being able to fire people." It was the kind of statement, like John McCain saying he didn't know exactly how many houses he owns, that can define a candidacy. It played right into the picture that Mitt Romney's opponents, both Democratic and Republican, had been trying to paint of him: that of a heartless "vulture capitalist" who made his fortune not by job creation, but by buying companies and laying off thousands.

It made Mitt Romney look like - well, like a guy you wouldn't want to have a beer with. In a political environment where a candidate ordering orange juice instead of coffee in a diner causes pundits to call his regular-guyness into question, it's hard to see it as anything but a major gaffe.

Romney's opponents seized on the quote. Rick Santorum's criticism was somewhat mild. "I am not too sure that is a very good message to a lot of folks out there," he said. Jon Huntsman was a little more pointed: "Gov. Romney enjoys firing people, I enjoy creating jobs."

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, started sounding like they were about to join Occupy Wall Street.

"There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business," Perry said. His campaign even made "I like being able to fire people" into a ringtone you could download from his website, no doubt bringing joy to the tiny black hearts of horrible bosses everywhere.

For his own part, Gingrich said, "I think there's a real difference between people who believe in the free market and people who go around, take financial advantage, loot companies, leave behind broken families, broken towns, people on unemployment."

A pro-Gingrich Super PAC released a video called "King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town." It called Romney a "predatory corporate raider" who "destroyed the American dream for thousands of workers and their families."

The ringtone has since been taken down, and Gingrich has backed off. "I think they're way overboard on saying he wants to fire people, he doesn't care," Gingrich said.

Whew. For a minute there, it was a little disorienting. I thought they were going to form a drum circle or something.

The Romney campaign complained that the comment had been taken out of context. Romney, they said, was talking about being able to ditch your insurance company when they're not serving you well.

They were, or course, right about the context. It was more than a little amusing, however, to hear that complaint coming from the campaign that had edited Barack Obama quoting something a Republican adviser had said about the McCain campaign ("If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose") and made it sound as if it was the president talking about his own campaign.

When confronted with that little bit of dishonesty, the Romney campaign was unapologetic. "He did say the words. That's his voice," Romney adviser Tom Rath insisted. So using the Romney campaign's own standard, the "fire people" quote was fair.

But we certainly don't want to use Mitt Romney's standard of what's fair, do we? That would be horrible. So let's look at what he actually meant.

"I don't want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to," Romney said at a press conference. "I believe in the setting as I described this morning where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don't like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it."

Problem is, "Obamacare" doesn't restrict that. In fact, just the opposite. The law doesn't empower the government to pick your insurance company or your doctor. Nor does it keep you from "firing" either one. In fact, through the health care law's prohibition on denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and the setting up of insurance "exchanges" that allow people to compare different companies, the ACA actually will make changing insurance easier than the current system.

And here's the thing: Mitt Romney knows that. As I hope they will continue to remind the American public, the Obama administration based much of the act on the one championed by Romney himself in Massachusetts.

So while Mitt Romney may or may not actually enjoy firing people, his actual quote shows us one thing: We don't want to use the Romney standard of what's truthful.