It’s not just on their side, either.
Now that they have to govern, Republicans are grappling with a tough initial challenge: how to detach themselves from an influential wing of their party that has never been interested in arguing facts. On a daily basis, these people bemoan, detest and feign outrage over utter fantasies. Some of the loudest voices are elected representatives; others are professional provocateurs interested in keeping their lecture fees high and their base in a lather.
I mean, I could triple my readership in a month if I just started making shit up. Sometimes it’s tempting, I gotta tell you. But as for the Republicans worrying about their nutters, Tim Egan has to realize that their whole game plan depends on them. It absolutely does. Where would the GOP be without Death Panels, and the Hawaiian birth certificate, and cries of socialism? Orly Taitz was gold to these people. ACORN, Henry Louis Gates Jr., New Black Panther Party, PARK 51, beheadings in the desert, Sharia Law coming to get you. You think the top brass of the GOP disapproves that crap? They revel in it. They finance it. And they need it. So, get some bottled water and duct tape, keep the bureaucrats away from your grammy, and stop worrying about the GOP’s ability to handle their nutters. It’s our side that doesn’t know how to handle them.
Also, too, Vince Foster!
I would be curious to know what you would invent as a faux report that would be as nutty as the stuff that the GOP is using. They must have daily brainstorming sessions just to come up with that much crap.
And besides, there is too much actually happening to drive the progressive base nuts without a whole lot of prevaricating. The nuttiness on our side has to do with attaching motives without evidence, forgetting that no one is psychic enough to know what anyone, especially any politician is actually thinking, planning, or experiencing.
The one time I lied, I got so much traffic my server was shut down for a day. Remember when that was? The Why’d He Tape.
that post was brilliant and it was this blog’s finest hour, sad to say.
sad because it engaged in ratfucking, something the other side lives off (and gleefully), and because it was so wildly successful, which, as you admit, only feeds the temptation to rely on it (“beware the dark side, luke!”).
but sometimes, as they say, it takes a thief, and without a doubt, if there’s anybody who deserves a good ratfucking, it’s a ratfucker. no quarter never recovered from that. it was not just a ratfuck, they got rat-reamed.
bravo!
If it takes a thief, you soon become a professional thief. If it takes a dragon to kill a dragon, you soon become a dragon.
Which is how the Republicans over 50 years have come to their sorry state. They thought that being like the Soviet Communists in their use of propaganda, sabotage, and espionage, their use of grassroots cell organization, and their propagation of and absolute ideology was America’s only defense against totalitarian communism. And it has now led them into a growing totalitarian movement of their own making. In which policy no longer matters and power does.
I feel the same ambivalence about it. They deserved it. It had to be done. But I’m not proud of it.
At least you haven’t pursued it as a long-term conscious strategy.
well, in preventing larry johnson’s evil plan from working, which would have scared off enough donors and delegates from obama just long enough to keep the nomination in hillary’s hands, you have something of which you can be duly proud. booman, you arguably, single-handedly, changed the course of human history, a feat which not many people in all of history can lay claim to without being perfunctorily laughed at.
Nah, I just ratfucked the ratfuckers. I provided some insurance, but I didn’t change the course of history.
Yea, its up to Obama to drive the wedge between the crazies and the establishment. The GOP does it all the time with dems- they love making Obama punch hippies. Obama needs to stop playing like he’s better than this, he’s gotta start fighting fire with fire. Is Obama just bad at politics?
Bipartisanshit means never having to say you like your own policies. Bipartisanshit means saying how valuable the policies of the enemy are. Bipartisanshit means that you and the other side gang up and trash your own policies.
Bipartisanshit means saying the Oath of Office only once, and even that was done incorrectly.
“remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.”
That excerpt suggests that governing republicans are more interested in facts and what’s best for America more than their teabagger electorate.
That suggestion is asinine.
non-governing repukeliscum, except they set the agenda.
The shit we are gonna hear for the next 2 years is gonna gag a moose.
I’m starting to understand just what a brilliant concept the Tea Party is. It provides a home for the loony right, and basically keeps them in the GOP tent, but without enough power to actually dictate policy. Being Teabaggers, they have license to fume and vent and stir up enough dust to keep that wing of the party energized. And as a bonus, they make the establishment Republicans look reasonable by comparison. Boehner and Graham and Hatch and their ilk will now look like centrists to most Americans.
The fact that if a prominent republican denies that A=A means, for the media, that there is controversy about the fact that A=A, is also a problem. I would be totally fine with democrats agreeing to call these people extremists, liars, wackos, and threats to democracy. But we can’t even get a consistent message from them, much less a sharp and hard hitting message.
Ever since the Weekly World News stopped (hardcopy) publication, there’s been a crying need for “making shit up”.
The TeaBaggers have rushed in to fill the void, but they still haven’t quite gotten the hang of it.
Now, if Michelle Bachmann would get up on her hind legs in Congress, and DEMAND that the US start an immediate NASA program to go to Mars for the purpose of rescuing Elvis, and teach those illegal aliens a LESSON, DAMMIT! Then we’ll know that the TeaBaggers will have finally found their role in American Society: Insane Clowns.
of course they can handle the nutters, which is reason 1230949040 why Sarah Palin won’t remotely be in the running for the GOP Nomination in 2012.