Month: July 2014

Kooky extremist cartoon

by digby

No, I’m not talking about Sarah Palin again. It’s this:

The creators of the YouTube series Conrad the Constitution complained to Infowars that their graphic depiction of President Obama being cowardly Second Amendmented in the back of the head ‘Abraham Lincoln style’ in a theater has earned them and their families visits from the Secret Service.

“I just wanted to let you guys know the Secret Service has been in contact with my family and is coming to interview me sometime soon about our latest episode. If I end up disappearing you’ll know why,” the ridiculous and paranoid e-mail read.

In the video, Conrad the Teabagging Constitution, Conrad steals Ron Paul’s time machine from his bunker and embarks on a mission to kill President Obama, who has shredded his future self. At the instruction of Ron Paul and his shredded self, Conrad travels back in time, sneaks up on the President, and shoots him in the back of the head.

I’m not surprised the Secret Service would investigate something like this. But the filmmakers see it as a repression of their free speech and a violation of the first amendment. (It’s still up on Youtube so … well, you know how hard it is for some people to understand what censorship really is.) The SS has an obligation to check these things out. People do sometimes get the wrong idea and when somebody seems to be saying that someone should kill the president for the good of the country it’s probably a good idea if it gets checked out. It’s certainly possible that one of the unhinged people who run around talking about their “2nd Amendment remedies” and “the blood of tyrants” all the time might be literal about it.

After I googled this silly story to get a sense of what this cartoon is I found that it’s a series of episodes that are carried all over the internet on Tea party and libertarian web sites. It’s a fascinating amalgam of right wing conspiracy theories, libertarian myth and conservative shibboleth. I think it may be the most accurate representation of the ideologically confused, hysterical right I’ve ever seen.

There are three “seasons” of this thing, more than any normal person could ever watch in a sitting. And perhaps the most hilarious thing about it is the fact that it bills itself this way:

Conrad the Constitution. Web series that follows Conrad, the living breathing U.S. Constitution.

I’m going to guess they’re unaware that the concept of a “living” Constitution is the hallmark of liberal jurisprudence.

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Friday friendly platypus blogging



by digby

Happy week-end everybody:

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Goldwater’s marching orders


by digby

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! — Barry Goldwater

Needless to say, what they consider liberty and justice differs just a tad from the rest of us …

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If only she were more like Judge Judy

by digby

This is a very telling little bit of history from the Clinton papers.  It’s a memo from Ron Klain to then Chief of Staff David Gergen about the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

And finally, Judge Ginsburg’s technique — her failure to make eye contact, her halting speech, her “laconic” nature (to use Jim Hamilton’s phrase) -~ is not helpful….

You should be cautious in dealing with her on these and other points. Judge Ginsburg views the White House’s interest and her interests as being at odds with each other: she sees us as having a stake in presenting her as a moderate and in getting along well with the Senate; she sees her interests as “being herself, ” preserving her “dignity’,” and promoting her “independence.”

Imagine that. A respected judge not wanting to be told to dance like a marionette for a bunch of blowhard Senators. (If I recall correctly, she did just fine.)

But you just have love the scare quotes around words like dignity and independence. What a silly lady …

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A truly evolved human being

by digby

It’s a good day to celebrate Mandela.  His words have never been more necessary …

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One personal reason for me to yearn for a Warren vs Clinton primary contest

by digby

John Dickerson has a piece explaining why an Elizabeth Warren run would be good for Hillary Clinton, which is the favorite kind of beltway piece on the subject. I think what they like most about it is this part:

She would energize the Democratic Party’s liberal base, which would then stir up other Democrats who seek to moderate or contain that group.

That’s always such fun. And I suspect the Villagers are yearning for a way to balance the crazy tea partiers with some false hippie equivalence. They are obviously uncomfortable with the fact that the crazies are a bunch of nice, white Real Americans whose culture and desires they’ve spent the last half century insisting they represent in Washington. How embarrassing for them …

I would welcome a Warren run for lots of good substantive policy and political reasons and I’ll undoubtedly write reams about this over the next couple of years if Warren decides to run. But let me just point out the one reason Dickerson doesn’t mention: how wonderful it would be for me to watch two intelligent, accomplished women stand for president and debate the issues? It’s still hard for me to believe that this would be the first time it’s happened.

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A video of a murder

by digby

There’s no other way to see this:

A 400-pound asthmatic Staten Island dad died Thursday after a cop put him in a chokehold and other officers appeared to slam his head against the sidewalk, video of the incident shows.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” Eric Garner, 43, repeatedly screamed after at least five NYPD officers took him down in front of a Tompkinsville beauty supply store when he balked at being handcuffed.

Within moments Garner, a married father of six children with two grandchildren, stopped struggling and appeared to be unconscious as police called paramedics to the scene. An angry crowd gathered, some recording with smartphones.

Read the whole thing. Witnesses say the man had just broken up a fight and wasn’t doing anything illegal. But the cops knew they were dealing with a criminal. He had a history of selling untaxed cigarettes, you see. So, you know, they had no choice.

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The Cercei Lannister of the Tea Party and her faithful Jamie

by digby

My piece in Salon today talks about the latest Cruz and Ingraham lunacy on immigration and how they accomplish their goals as a movement even when they aren’t in power. You’ve probably heard about Cruz upping the ante on immigration and making the demand that the president roll back his order to stop deporting the DREAM kids. But Ingraham has some even more noxious plans:

Earlier this week, Breitbart news announced that the Cercei Lannister of of the Tea Party, Laura Ingraham, has a new pet project:

“I’m all in for Joe Carr,” Ingraham said on her show. “I think he’s, look, he’s no nonsense, a citizen legislator he’ll be and he’ll be someone who will actually listen to the people, politicians at some point do have to listen to the concerns of the people, not just the concerns of one or two, big, fat, interest groups like either LaRaza or the Chamber of Commerce, the people still count, don’t they Lamar?”

Ingraham has previously promoted Carr’s candidacy based on his record of opposing amnesty, and Carr even signed the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s “no-amnesty pledge” on her radio show.

“Laura Ingraham was one of the very first national voices who felt that our campaign against Lamar Alexander’s brazen support of amnesty was credible and viable,” Carr said. “After seeing the significant impact Laura had on the Dave Brat-Eric Cantor race, we believe this can be a game-changing moment in this campaign.”

Joe Carr is a Tea Party candidate running against incumbent Senator Lamar Alexander in Tennessee and as you can see, the myth of Ingraham’s mystical juju has taken on a life of its own, regardless of the truth of it. The polling may have shown that upstart David Brat beat Majority Leader Eric Cantor for a variety of reasons relating to the district but the narrative that took hold is that he won because of his hostility to big business and “amnesty”. Ingraham’s personal support is considered to have been key to his victory. (Note that her alleged opposition to business comes in the guise of the Chamber of Commerce solely because of its support for immigration reform. )

So far, this Tea-Party-backed upstart is behind by a substantial margin but polling shows that he’s recently started to gain ground. One more come-from-behind victory for Ingraham and we could be seeing the makings of a new Republican kingmaker — a kingmaker who loathes these people she believes are threatening “our way of life and our culture” so intensely that she now endorses a form of selective ethnic cleansing:

“No. 1, first thing you do is start deporting people, not by the hundreds, not by the dozens, by the thousands. That means entire families, not just the father or mother, but we keep families unified by deporting all people who are here illegally.”

(Bill O’Reilly was lauded for his opposition to what she said there, but it should be noted that his objection was based on how it would “look” in the media, not the act itself.)

read on …

The stories we tell ourselves

by digby

You’ve probably already read quite a bit about Hillary Clinton’s stint on Jon Stewart. (You can watch it here.) I was intrigued by this comment:

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, that’s really why this book is something that I put my heart and soul into, because we can’t practice diplomacy and define our foreign policy as leaders talking to leaders anymore because that’s not the way the world works. Exactly as you said. People are empowered from the bottom up. And what I found when I became secretary of state is that so many people in the world, especially young people, they have no memory of the United States liberating Europe and Asia, beating the Nazis, fighting the Cold War and winning. That was just ancient history. They didn’t know the sacrifices that we had made and the values that motivated us to do it.

We have not been telling our story very well. We do have a great story. We are not perfect by any means, but we have a great story about human freedom, human rights, human opportunity, and let’s get back to telling it to ourselves first and foremost and believing it about ourselves and then taking that around the world. That’s what we should be standing for.

STEWART: Can we expect other countries to view us with such nuance when we so clearly don’t view them with nuance and with that type of understanding?

CLINTON: that’s a really good question, because…

STEWART: that’s all the time we have.

[laughter]

CLINTON: Because.

STEWART: Because.

CLINTON: Because we did a much better job telling the world who we were back in the Cold War. You know, it was a simpler job, to be fair. We had the Soviet Union. We had the United States. We had a big information effort. We sent talent, we sent all kinds of poets and novelists and rock stars. I remember when Vaclav Havel, the great dissident and the first president of the Czech Republic told me that Lou Reed had been his inspiration. American culture, American ideas permeated the world.

Wll, fast forward. That ended, and we kind of thought, okay, fine, end of history, democracy won. You know that story. And in fact, we withdrew from the information arena. And look at what happened initially with Ukraine. Russian media was much more effective in sort of telling a story: it wasn’t true, but they kept repeating it over and over again. So I think we have to get back to a consensus in our own country about who we are and what we stand for, and then get out there and tell that story.

My first reaction was hostility based upon the perception that she was saying we need to pat ourselves on the back about being exceptional more than we have been and then we’ll live happily ever after. And frankly, if we wanted another round of Bushian proclamations about how “we’re so good and they’re so evil” I think we should probably just vote for Jeb and call it a day. But after watching it again, I realized that I might have been unfair. If what she was really getting at was a need to “find consensus” on the values that animate the Enlightenment spirit of our constitution and the Declaration of Independence, then I’m all for it. It would be the first time in our history that we were able to do it, but it’s probably something worth doing.

If she’s talking about some sort of “greatest country the world has ever known” boosterism, then she’s not going to get very far. It’s been a long time since World War II and the idea that we were widely considered to be the Good Guys during the Cold War just is not the case. We may have been considered “the better guy” in that match up by many in the western world, sure. Others disagreed. But this country did a lot of shady stuff during that era that’s still haunting us today and it wasn’t all in the name of “freedom and democracy.”

If Clinton wants to tell a better American story and have people to come to a consensus about who we are, she has to tell the story straight and then explain how we can best try to live up to our higher ideals in the future. Constantly telling ourselves a bunch of fairy tales about how great we are has painted us into a corner in which the worst elements of our leadership can rationalize any behavior — including torture and indefinite detention in prison camps — and nobody is willing to hold them accountable for it.

The funny thing is that the old idea that the monarch was infallible and ordained by God is exactly what the American revolutionaries were rebelling against. I’m going to guess they didn’t anticipate that we would imbue our new country as a whole with the same nonsense.

Update: I see I’m not the only one who thought this was a bizarre statement.

It’s safer for them because they aren’t important

by digby

So a congressional delegation went to Honduras to see what conditions were for the child refugees in their home country and came back with this:

Congressman Steve Pearce said Wednesday that most immigrants from Central America who are crossing illegally into the United States are driven by economic reasons, not fear of physical danger in their homeland.

…

Pearce said he and the rest of the House delegation that visited Honduras and Guatemala did not venture from their hotel very often because of the dangers, but the message they received in both countries was consistent: “Send back our children.”

Right. It’s much too dangerous for God fearing Real Americans to venture out into the streets but little kids are wily and quick and they can slither out of the grasp of the violent criminals who want to kidnap, torture and kill them. Anyway, it’s character building.

If it makes the poor Central American parents who sent their kids north in a desperate bid for safety and a chance at life feel any better, these people hate American children too so don’t take it too personally.

Via