Turdblossom's Sh*tty Diagnosis

The irrational fear of Hillary Clinton's possible candidacy for President in 2016 is rampant on the right.  The Rethuglican House Select Committee to Smear Hillary Clinton on Benghazi Benghazi! BENGHAZI!! is the primary attack vehicle on her tenure as Secretary of State.  Then we have the pond scum-level attacks that emanate from the likes of Karl "Turdblossom" Rove, the most recent being the nasty, false insinuation that she suffers brain damage from a concussion in 2012.  On The Colbert Report last night, Stephen Colbert delivered a hilarious smack down to Turdblossom's attempted smear.  Enjoy.

The Colbert Report
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Quote of the Day

"In the introduction to my book, I took note of a sick political culture where 'facts are so easily twisted for political purposes and where strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition.' That sentence is now cited on right-wing Web sites as evidence that I hold them in contempt. True enough, one of the few accurate things that I’ve read from them. I do hold some of them in contempt, not because of their politics, nor because of their dislike of Obama. Political debate and disagreement are the lifeblood of American democracy. No, I hold them in contempt for the way they disregard facts and common sense and undermine the role of serious history as they concoct conspiracy theories that portray the president as dangerous, alien and less than American." -- Pulitzer Prize winning David Maraniss, author of "Barack Obama: The Story," in a Kaplan Daily op-ed (no link). If right-wingers don't like the facts in front of them, they'll create their own.

"Time to Stand Up..."

E.J. Dionne says what we've been waiting to hear on the op/ed pages of the Kaplan Daily: it's time to stand up to the Fox News crowd. He takes on the Kaplan Daily's own useless idiot, ombudsman Andrew "Not Great" Alexander, among others in the fearful media. Money quote:

"...[t]he mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda."

Chamber of Horrors

Steven Perlstein's op/ed in today's WaPo, "U.S. Chamber of Commerce Reaping the Whirlwind," nails the cheese balls at the Chamber, starting with its head(cheese) Tom Donohue. Saying "the world is finally catching on to his game" of anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government Rethug rhetoric, Perlstein reviews Donohue's / the Chamber's pattern of disingenuousness on health reform, climate change, financial market reform, etc., as they work hand-in-glove with the Rethugs. While one shouldn't be surprised that the Chamber and Donohue love them some Rethugs, the worrisome thing is the tactics being employed - more of the same fear-mongering and false information that characterizes other Rethug operations (the NRA, astroturfing tea baggers, the birthers and deathers, etc. etc.).

You don't necessarily expect that from an institution like the Chamber. Conservative positions, yes; outright lying and distortions, no. The lying has even come into the Chamber's own self-puffery. Perlstein (and others) note that the Chamber's claim of 3 million members is wildly exaggerated - it's actually 300,000. And many of those members aren't eager to be associated with the Chamber's reactionary world view (witness the recent defections of Apple, Nike and PG&E over the Chamber's climate change position). Yet another Rethug disinformation operation that needs some daylight shed into its operations and tactics.

Quote of the Week - Crackpot Edition

"The American Right-wing with few exceptions is totally Pacifist. The [right wing] does NOTHING BUT TALK. MORAL: America dies for want of men." Right-wing nutball James von Brunn on his web site, as quoted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, via Balloon Juice.

Yeah, he's a liberal.

Der Uberschmuck

Fux News Gauleiter Sean Hannity can't seem to stop distorting everything the Obama Administration does, especially when it's done by the President. There used to be an unwritten rule that while a President was overseas, criticism was held until he returned. Not so with Gauleiter Hannity. He deliberately cropped a quote from the President's speech in Cairo to make it seem as though Obama wanted to give "equal time" to the 9/11 terrorists. Media Matters has the video.

It's one thing to disagree with someone's comments after giving their full context -- which the Rethug right refuses to do (see Judge Sotomayor) -- but it's nothing but a lie to crop speeches or statements to create the impression that the speaker was saying something that he/she wasn't saying at all. Gauleiter Hannity has apparently learned much from the Third Reich's approach to "information."

Preemptive Sliming: A Case Study

If you want to understand how a right wing smear develops and is propagated, read John Cole's summation of the excellent piece by Glenn Greenwald in Salon about the New Republic's smearing of Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor is one of a number of female judges that would be under consideration to fill Justice Souter's chair when he retires. Apparently, anonymous weasels on the right wing launched a whisper campaign to preempt Judge Sotomayor's consideration by President Obama, and they used a two-legged turd by the name of Jeffrey "Slimer" Rosen, writing in the New Republic, to do the job on the Judge. The article was full of catty, unattributed smears, something that belongs on a bathroom stall.

Bear in mind that Sotomayor, a Princeton (summa cum laude) and Yale-educated jurist, has served on the Second Court of Appeals for over 10 years, and is well regarded as a centrist by the American Bar Association. Undoubtedly, the fact that she worked her way up from a working class Puerto Rican family in the Bronx makes some right wing, silver-spoon elites nervous, as they observe her from their clubs and the cocktail circuit. Tough torts. There are a lot of great choices for the President, but this episode has made us root for Judge Sotomayor all the more.