I Don't Like You Either

Department of Valedictions: Meanwhile, Kristol Waves a Fond Farewell to Cheney....

Cheney is a douchebag wrapped in an enigma and dipped in a mystery, but Bill Kristol is still just a douchebag.  Amazingly, Fox News viewers and others still listen to him, proving that what we suspected about them all along is TRUE.

From Think Progress, this delightful wingnuttery on the half-shell:

Snark O' the Day: Neocons Want Barry O. to Fix Everything Bush Broke

Suddenly, it's our problem and only our problem.  They'll just stand on the sidelines and jeer.  If they had any constructive ideas, or anything like a solution, we'd have heard them back when it mattered.

From Father Tyme at  BlondeSense:

Ain’t it just curious now with the NeoCon and Republican roaches braving the light of day, that all of a sudden they profess concern about, oh, food quality, health items, housing, jobs...ethics...etc.?

Wingnuts in a Nutshell: Bill Kristol Solves Global Jihadism

Jihad's True Face

Nutshell version:  "Only patriotism, endless global warfare, racial profiling, and punishing the innocent along with the guilty, can save us from global jihad."

Though probably you will prefer TBogg's "shorter":

Wingnuts in the Nutshell: William Kristol

by Teh Puppet Mistress |

Before he Goes [Kristol]

Nutshell version:  Bush could perform a real service to me and other discredited neocons by (1) lying some more; and (2) pardoning the worst offenses of his minions so that no one connected with his administration can discredit us further.

Snark O' the Day: What Makes a Jonah Goldberg a Jonah Goldberg?

by Teh Puppet Mistress | Susan of Texas answers:

Jonah Goldberg has an extraordinarily strong Authoritarian drive. It's strong enough to override an also-strong rebellious streak, embodied in his love of anti-social pop culture heroes like Homer and Bart Simpson and in South Park. It's strong enough to crush any creative streak that might have lurked in this former tv writer and producer. It's even strong enough to make him support the types of people who would be horrified by Goldberg, an East Coast elite Jewish writer; the evangelicals.

Jonah states you can't be conservative without being religious. He appeals to authority by listing several conservatives that purport to be religious. It does not occur to him that his Authorities might be lying or disbelievers ; for instance, it's well know that Karl Rove is an atheist. Jonah also seems to state that if you are religious you must also be conservative, or else you will start acting out of mercy and give away to the poor, which would make you a liberal. QED, in Jonah's snarled mind.   (More at The Hunting of the Snark)

Jane Hamsher Responds to Sarah Palin's Slam Against Liberal Bloggers

by Blue Stockings |  The Caucus:

Ms. Palin directed most of her media criticism at liberal bloggers, whom she twice called, “those bloggers in their parents’ basement just talkin’ garbage.”

After reeling off a list the credentials of liberalism's most formidable, Hamsher asks:

How would Sarah feel if someone called her an ignorant, freeloading bubble headed piece of trailer park trash whose daddy told the AP she spent the weekend scrambling to return her stolen clothes to the RNC?

Shorter Bill Kristol

by Damozel |  Full version of article:  GOP Dog Days

Nutshell version:  While I shall stubbornly go on contending that it wasn't that much of a victory for Obama and the left, and that the public has not thoroughly repudiated me and my noxious brand of conservatism, I can no longer deny it:  Obama is as cute as cuddly puppy from the pound---if a puppy had a dry wit and charisma---and therefore formidable, and we conservatives can but trust that the worldbeating recession that we have willed to him may yet bring him down.

PS.  The country is still center right and Obama must govern accordingly.  That's the meme, and I'm sticking to it.

Blogger reactions at Memeorandum

Snark O' the Day: Did Obama Crib His Acceptance Speech from Hitler?

by Teh Puppet Mistress | Wingnuts all over the blogosphere are busily whipping themselves up into pleasurable extremes of terror.  It's worrying---what do bloggers such as the one cited below intend to achieve, one asks?---but also, if  you can preserve your detachment, exceedingly funny in a horrifying kind of a way.

From Scott at World O'Crap:

I thought the news of Obama’s victory would strike wingnuts in one of two ways.  Either they’d sit, stinking and unwashed in a corner of their room, blinking rapidly and speaking in tongues to a headless Barbie doll — what we might call “the K-Lo Option” — or else they’d attach a hobby horse to their computer chairs, sort of like those Cowboy booster seats you used to sit on at the barber shop, and charge at full gallop into the World Wide Web on a suicidal crusade of blood and thunder, hacking at heretics and heathens and howling in rage and agony like a gutted Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart.  It never dawned on me that they would arise the next day, scratch their cat under the chin, pour a nice cup of tea, sit down at the keyboard, and in a prim, dainty, ladylike fashion, go quietly batshit insane, as though we’d entered an alternate universe where Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote was the star of Dexter. But color me abashed, because RenewAmerica is proudly offering Mary Mostert’s latest:

As we’ve said before, this wasn’t an election, it was the world’s longest Usenet thread, and Godwin’s Law is no longer an observation on probability, it’s a regulation imposed by wingnuts, sort of like those Homeowner Association bylaws that require everyone to landscape solely from the pre-approved list of shrubs, and to paint all exterior trim a uniform beige.....[More]

Shorter P.J. O'Rourke

by Teh Nutroots |  From Liberal Hell, P.J. has penned:  We Blew It

As Conservatives, we have tragically failed ourselves, our movement, and the rising generation through our inability to convince Americans that liberals (including all Democrats) and liberalism are by definition stupid, worthless, evil, venal, clueless, hateful and economically and ethically challenged, and that everything that has happened during the last eight years is all Bill Clinton's fault.

National Review Online Takes It to the Keyboards

by Teh Nutroots | Oh man.  Check out Sadly, No!'s two-minute version of the NRO symposium par excellence as they ponder the nation's Great Black Hope.   Then click on the link to the real one and laugh even harder.

Snark O' the Day: "Splitters!"

by Damozel |  I normally wouldn't draw our daily dose of snark from the same blog two days running, but TBogg is a master, and this---like yesterday's---is masterly, both in its ruthless efficiency and accuracy in identifying and lancing the latest unattractive inflammatory groundswell and its peerless use of pop culture references as the instrument of choice.  Yesterday, it was Galaxy Quest.  Today:  one of my top five all-time films, Life of Brian.

Obama got elected three days ago and the wingers are all depressed, which they consider to be proof that they are also now, and destined in the future to be, oppressed.  They're always mad, but now they're even madder---as well as in a panicky tailspin---and so the leading lights of the right are busily organizing a Republican Resistance movement.   

Sadly, their defeat has forced them to confront how much they actually hate one another.  None of them can agree even on the fundamentals of how to build a better GOP.

TBogg considers the struggle of the emergent warring sects to find some common ground, and their ensuing abject failure:

Divided we stand"...no...wait...um... "united we flail" ...no, that's not it. Crap, I think I wrote it down on a Wendy's napkin. Look in the back seat of my car.... Oh, here we go....

He's got the list, the clip, and the final word. 

We Don't Like You Either: Scary Rictus-Grinning Bill Kristol (The Daily Show Interview)

Talk about your Halloween horror shows....

HuffPost:

Bill Kristol knocked his own paper, the New York Times, on "The Daily Show" last night, and repeated his prediction that John McCain will win the White House on Tuesday.

Jon Stewart joked with the error-prone Kristol, who he has mocked before, "You can't look at past performance as a predictor, otherwise you wouldn't be, obviously, still a pundit."

"You're reading The New York Times too much, Jon," Kristol told Stewart, only for Stewart to remind him that he works there. "Oh, it's a very fine newspaper — on one day of the week.

Joe the Plumber: Too Far Right for Fox?

We missed this, so here it is now:  Shep Smith of Fox News gives Joe the Plumber the big eye roll.

The Joe the No Show Haiku Project

by Damozel | Okay, everyone's read about Joe the No Show and has seen this:

But we  thought Ambinder's poetic tribute was a whole ship full of awesome, and maybe you didn't see that:

"Joe's with us today,"
Joe. Where are ya? Where is Joe?
Is Joe here with us?

Sadly, he has now been called out by Progressive Accountability---rightly---for calling it a haiku when it is NOT a haiku. 

CLAIM - Marc Ambinder Claims He Has Written a Haiku

FACT - A Haiku is 5-7-5, Ambinder dangerously misleads the American people by writing a "Haiku" that is 6-7-5.

Statement - "With only five days until the election this misuse of Japanese poetry could unravel the very fabric of American democracy.  We immediately demand that the first line be amended to "Joe's with us today" to comply with the use of syllables that the American people deserve and expect from The Atlantic."

I suggest these changes:

Joe?  Where did you go? today....
Joe. Where are ya? Where is Joe?
Is Joe here with us?

I think this is even more plangent than the original.

The Daily Show: How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth is an Ungrateful Rogue

What Would Your Name be if Sarah Palin Were Your Mom?

by Damozel | Heh.  What's your Palin name? I personally like "Jeep Pike Palin."

Biden's Orlando Interview

by The Puppet Mistress |  I'm going to agree with Thers:

Pretty much all you need to know about why the GOP is losing this election is to be found in the high-fiving among "conservatives" about this interview where a ridiculous local TV host from Orlando asks Joe Biden completely asinine leading wingnut questions about why Barack Obama is just like Karl Marx. Biden came across like a grownup; the interviewer looked like, well, someone from the Onion News Network, only not funny and all too real.

The only part where I disagree is this:  the self-satirizing interviewer was funny.  I doubt it did Biden any harm with non-Republicans.

McCain is Getting Tired (Two Embarrassing-in-Two-Entirely-Different-Ways Misfires)

When my mom does it, she calls it "having a senior moment."  Er, not that she's ever slipped up and said this:

David Frum Takes on Rachel Maddow; Has His Arse Handed to Him

by Teh Nutroots | ....and doesn't even know it.  This is, of course, the man who gave the world "the axis of evil" and who feels that The Colbert Report isn't "serious" enough.  Of course, only a self-important humorless git could have said this about his career as a speech-writer for Bush:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything." (truthout)

Seriously, watch this:

A Klassy Salute to Sarah from Her Supporters

by Teh Nutroots | ....Obama imagined as a 1950's style shoeshine, cleaning Sarah Palin patent leather pump while she smiles obliviously.  Click and "enjoy."   This, then, is the "wit" of the Republican wingnut base, in other words "the Republican base" (otherwise known as the Republican rabble, or riff-raff.)   

And yeah.  I'm a proud elitist.  I don't have any use for willfully stupid bigots.

10,000 McCainiacs: Jon Stewart Looks at the Roused Rabble

The Booing of Sarah Palin

by Teh Nutroots | The New York Times' "Slapshot" covered this, but we prefer Deb's piece:  "Hockey Mom Gets Booed at Hockey Game."  Deb's posted the video.  Boy howdy, did she ever.

Wonkette comments:

Hey McCain-Palin campaign: not to say “we told you so,” but in fact to say “HA HA TROLLOPS, we told you so,” Sarah Palin was not received well by Philadelphia hockey fans tonight when she dropped the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers’ season opener. Liberal gotcha journal the New York Times describes the chorus of boos as “resounding (almost deafening).” This video is staggering. We’re fairly certain that the arena music is turned up louder in a vain attempt to drown out the SONIC WALL of booing.

But then...John Cole kind of put it into perspective.  I hate it when that happens.

For the record, I would not read into anything regarding the booing.  This is Philly.  Remember this?

Atrios, calling it a "stupid stunt," also says it was inevitable. 

Anyway, as everybody knows Philadelphia fans boo everyone. How much Sarah Palin's booing was political (as in, we hate Palin), how much of it was just booing the injection of politics into the game, and how much was simply booing because that's what Philadelphia fans do I have no idea. The point is that from the moment it was announced everyone knew she was going to be booed.

Whatever, there is now footage all over the internet of what sounds like every hockey fan in Philly booing Sarah Palin.  So ha ha ha anyway.  I felt kind of bad for the kid.  Like Atrios said, Palin shouldn't have dragged her into it. 

Letterman Won't Let Up: Messages from Sarah Palin; Palin Recaps Herself

thanks, Wonkette....

Aden Nak's Flow Chart of Palin's Debating Style (How to Deal with All Those Darned Questions!)

Wonkette sez:

This is pretty much perfect, except maybe somewhere you could squeeze in, “That Joe person is crying about his dead family?! –> Shout Maverick several times,” which is something that happened.

It is awesome.   It is going VIRAL.  And it was created by Aden Nak of Ph33r & Loathing. 

Robert Schlesinger Sums Up Palin's Response to the Bailout Question

by Nicholas | Via Eunomia, this quote from Robert Schlesinger:

It’s like a talking points machine gone out of control. Or magnetic poetry that you have on your fridge—in fact, you can try it at home. String together key words and phrases like “shore up the economy,” “reduce tax rates,” “healthcare reform,” and “trade” and see what kind of Palinisms you can create.

It'll give you something to do while civilisation crumbles round your ears.

Project "Make McCain Exciting": Blue Suede Shoes

'Nutball Blogger' Spreads Palin Smear! Pass it On!!!!!!

by Nicholas | First, you see, there was a report setting forth allegations concerning Palin which, IF TRUE, would demonstrate that she holds attitudes which even the GOP (well, most of them) would consider unacceptable in a VP.

But is the report true?   Personally, I would need more and harder evidence to feel sure enough even to suggest that it might be true.  I've no way to assess the credibility of the people who repeated the statements imputed to Palin.

And here at IDLYE, we assume that if these reported "whisperings" have any basis in fact, further evidence will be forthcoming.  If not, we don't want any part of it.

There are actually already enough Palin negatives (e.g., here, here, here, here) to scare off anyone except the hardcore wingnuts and the evangelical Christians. Even my wife's 80 year old Republican mother in South Carolina thinks the Palin pick was "wacky."

But GOP timeserver Michelle Malkin couldn't just dismiss the piece with an airy wave.  She went into full-on panicky bug-eyed mode.  Here's the nutshell version:

"Groundless left-wing smears circulating among moonbats!  Laughable!   Untrue!  Ludicrous!  Hahahahahaha, the real racists are the Lefty Moonbats!  PASS IT ON!"

Shorter See-Dubya

by Teh Nutroots |  Palin attacks counterproductive as well as moronic

Nutshell Version:  Only the desperate morons of the Left would go plucking stories about vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin right off the newsvine in order to point and laugh at them.  Instead, they should emulate the intelligent and restrained bloggers of the far right, who---far more productively---only mock stories they make up themselves.

Memeorandum has commentary here.

Wingnuts in a Nutshell: Shorter William Kristol

by Teh Nutroots | Let Palin Be Palin:  Why the Left is Scared to Death of McCain's Running Mate 

As always, I count on my party's base to be so out of touch with their own interests and reality in general that they will once again vote for a ticket poised to sell them out to big corporations and rich guys like me.  On the other hand---if I weren't stuck in the role of rictus-grinning neocon cheerleader---I'd admit that I'm as gobsmacked and frightened as the next GOPper that McCain chose someone to be VP who gives us nothing more to trust in than the cluelessness of our base.  What if you really can't fool some of the people all of the time?

More here.

Laughing at Them, Not With Them (A Round-Up of Grade A Snark)

by Teh Nutroots |  For the connoisseur of progressive snark, Teh Nutroots recommends:

[1] "Shorter Richard Cohen" at Sadly, No!

[2] "malkin after midnight" by skippy the bush kangaroo. skippy reports on the ATTACK on the malkin!  The reports of the threat have been greatly exaggerated....not that you would know this from the reaction of what skippy calls the-hardly-ever-right.   

[3] See also Gavin M. at SN!: Shorter Right-Wing Blogosphere; Oliver Willis: 9/11 Truthers Vs. Michelle Malkin;  Greywolf at Hitchens Watch:  When Alex Met Michelle 

[4] TBogg:  The Great Escape