Cartoon And Read Of The Day - Trump's Sh*tshow

(click on image to enlarge)



(Brian McFadden, via gocomics.com)

Frequent blind squirrel and Reagan/ Thatcher Tory Andrew Sullivan had some thoughts in his live blogging of the sh*tshow last night:

Just mulling over the events tonight, there’s one obvious stand-out. I didn’t hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the members of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation. 

If you think of the conservative movement as beginning in 1964 and climaxing in the 1990s, then the era we are now in is suffering from a cancer of the mind and the soul. That the GOP has finally found a creature that can personify these urges to purge, a man for whom the word “shameless” could have been invented, a bully and a creep, a liar and cheat, a con man and wannabe tyrant, a dedicated loather of individual liberty, and an opponent of the pricelessly important conventions of liberal democracy is perhaps a fitting end. 

This is the gutter, ladies and gentlemen, and it runs into a sewer. May what’s left of conservatism be carried out to sea.

First of all, cheers to that last graph.

To be specific though, the "conservative movement" Sullivan says began in 1964 with Barry Goldwater was undeniably founded on "mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred."  It has always been a white nativist movement, exclusionary in its "patriotism," authoritarian at heart, comforting the comfortable.  To imagine there wasn't a "cancer" at its heart when it ejected Rockefeller Republicans in San Francisco in 1964; when it opted for the racist "Southern Strategy" in 1968; when Reagan kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980; when Poppy Bush ran the Willie Horton ads in 1988;  with the 7- year- long campaign to delegitimize President Obama and cast him as somehow not American;  to imagine ALL THAT just happened to spring up personified in the form of Donald "Rump" Trump is to be in profound denial and profoundly ahistorical.

But, hey, welcome to reality anyway.

The Perfect Gift For Sully Fans

Is it just us, or could this holiday gift idea be called the "Andrew Sullivan face warmer?"

Vandalism, Extortion, and the Rethuglican Way

Traditional conservative Andrew Sullivan is not mincing words when he observes what the Rethuglican extremists are doing:

"Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied. The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals. This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come."

Welcome the Converted

First there was John Cole ("Balloon Juice"); then Andrew Sullivan (Atlantic's "Daily Dish"). Now comes the co-founder of the mega-wingnut web consortium Pajamas Media, Charles Johnson, into the world of the rational. Johnson, who blogs at the (former wingnut) site "Little Green Footballs", can still be called a conservative on security and foreign policy matters, but his conversion from the dark side has been prompted, some say, by the sheer lunacy at large in the Rethug far right. So, we've added "Little Green Footballs" to our blog roll, as well as Sully's blog -- unless and until they do a 180. (We're sure it's the highlight of their week!)

(Photo: Charles Johnson, LGF)

"A Word To The Neocons"

From The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, referring to the treatment of Iranian protesters who have been jailed by the Ahmadiddledoo regime:

"A word to the neocons: you have no standing to protest the barbaric treatment of these prisoners any more. And you have made their torture more helpless, more powerful, more brutal than it would otherwise have been. As these protesters. . .look toward America, as they try to see a beacon somewhere that would let them know that their torturers have no standing in the civilized world, they find one thing.

That beacon? Neoconservatism snuffed it out."

Well said.