The Smirking Cynic 2.0

Whenever I think I’ve got good ol’ Michelle Bachmann figured out, she makes another talking head show and says something so mind-blowingly stupid that it leaves one in awe. Then you come to realize that a good number of people out there believe it and you want to drink. Heavily.

KING: Well what’s wrong with majority rule?

BACHMANN: Well because that’s not how the Senate works. The senate works with 60 votes and now what the President is promoting is a “nuclear option” which is 50 votes. So we should have an up or down vote, but it…

KING: But they’ve used that majority rules on the Bush tax cuts. It was 51 votes.

BACHMANN: Well the House uses straight majority rule, the Senate doesn’t. So what this would mean, Larry, is that the Senate has to break their own rules in order to pass the bill.

KING: And that’s wrong?

BACHMANN: Oh I think it is, sure.

Thank you Larry King for being as unbiased as possible so as not to call this woman a fucking liar on your TV show.

Let’s be clear here, because I think it needs special emphasis for our special needs viewers out there who vote against their own interests. US Government 101: The United States Senate runs on a majority rule basis. At least until 2008 it did. I know it’s been difficult to see that since the minority Republicans have invoked the Senate rule of the filibuster to block any and all legislation that makes this president look good, but it is still the case. Bachmann, in her appearance on Larry King Live, is one of two things:

1. Lying
2. Immeasurably stupid

Either option should be grounds for her dismissal from public office, but they’ll let any guano fueled gas bag hold office. That said, Michelle Bachmann is a clear illustration of everything that is wrong with congress. I know she isn’t the only example of this, but she is clearly the front runner in the CrazyStupid Congressional Moron Marathon. She knows nothing of actual public service and instead devotes 100% of her time and energy being nakedly partisan for the pure sake of partisanship. She devotes nothing for the betterment of her country, let alone her constituents. She is an awful person who really should retire immediately, give up all her worldly possessions to the poor and live on the streets of Calcutta for the rest of her life. No joke. She is a waste of taxpayer money and energy.

So, yeah, Bachmann. Don’t like her. I find her embarrassing not only to my state but also my country. I wouldn’t waste precious saliva to spit on her. Moving on…

But what I find funny in the above quote is that Larry tries to point out how hypocritical she’s being by stating that Budget Reconciliation is something Republicans used happily when it came to Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Not to be deterred, Michelle effectively ignored the cold fact and continued lying. To me this points out how utterly desperate the congressional Republicans have become. It’s clear that they’ve failed to stop Health Care Reform. It’s passed both chambers of congress. All it takes is for the House to vote in favor of the Senate version. That’s gonna be a done deal. All Republicans have left is to scare the living shit out of the American people and hope to get them into enough of a fever so as to possibly change the minds of a few spineless Democrats in the House to NOT vote for the Senate version. And that’s all they’ve got.

What you’re seeing from Bachmann is going to continue. And it’s really, really sad. Rather than offering a comprehensive alternative to Democratic proposals, Republicans wanted to play politics in the hopes Health Care Reform would get buried in their patented bullshit sophistry. It didn’t. So now they’re left with the historical badge of “We Fought Progress” which they proudly share with 1960s Dixiecrats who tried to stop basic civil rights. Their mothers would be so proud.

Sarah Palin’s biggest complaint/defense of her past performance is that the “liberal” or, my favorite, “lamestream media” is picking on small details. That they are somehow holding her up to a standard that is higher than most. And her followers eat this shit up. How dare the media ask questions, demand substance and look for depth?

If you’re one of these people, then perhaps you shouldn’t watch this video. It kinda encapsulates the double-standard that Palin, herself, wants to live by. You see she’s the first person to complain that Obama uses the teleprompter too much…

…well at least he hasn’t resorted to the “I’m going to cheat on my exam” method of crib notes during his Q&A. He just leveled the entire House Republican Caucus at their retreat on national television. (For those of you who watch Fox, they cut away during the parts where he completely destroyed their talking points but you can catch the entire thing on the White House site. Send complaints to Roger Ailes c/o Fox News.) And he did that without having answers hand-fed to him by scribbled notes on the palm of his hand.

I guess tickets to this Tea Party event were upwards of a few hundred dollars each. And I would gladly pay that amount to see Sarah Palin stand in front of the House Democratic Caucus because I guarantee you it would be a totally different outcome. And I don’t even like them all that much.

But I think the kicker of this is what she did scrawl on her palm.

“Energy”
“Budget Cuts”
“Tax”
“Lift American Spirits”

She needed fucking crib notes for this? What a totally empty vessel.

Any guy from my generation liked the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Anyone who tells you they didn’t is lying or dead inside or quite possibly both. There was a simplicity and an honesty to the comic that rings through today with just as much relevance as it did when it was first published. And through it all, Bill Watterson, the author, seemed to have a message but he always left it up to the reader.

When he stopped writing the comic, many fans (myself included) were hurt. It was as though a piece of us was being taken forcibly away. What compounded the matter was that Watterson went into seclusion, refusing interviews for the past 15 years, which pretty much left us all feeling like the dumpee who wondered what we did.

Well that all changed when the Cleveland Plain Dealer scored an interview with the man himself. And some of his answers are just as poetic as his comic strips. A few of the better quotes:

What are your thoughts about the legacy of your strip?

Well, it’s not a subject that keeps me up at night. Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to. Again, my part in all this largely ended as the ink dried.

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved — and are still grieving — when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

A rather interesting story hit the wires yesterday that I thought could use a bit more light. But the story itself needs a bit of history to fully enjoy its flavor.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now – ACORN – has had a bit of a bad rap since the 2008 election cycle. Indeed most conservatives react to the very mention of its name in much the same way most of the reality-based community reacts to Blackwater. And a bit of that reputation has been sadly earned by ACORN employees who were filmed last year giving tax advice to a prostitute and her pimp, which in reality was a couple of extremely cocky college Republicans who were bent on exposing all of Acorn as a fraud. Or at the very least proprietors of burlesque tax advice. The “pimp” was actually James O’Keefe, a smug conservative of the selective-memory persuasion who went on to every pundit show Fox asked him to appear. This was a hearty black eye for the political left and the right absolutely wallowed in political capital it gave to them. After all, ACORN was founded by Obama in Kenya and would prove to be the lynch pin that would bring down his socialistic fascist machinations that are meant to burn the Constitution and enslave the young minds of America. (Editor’s note: That last sentence was sarcasm, in case you missed it.)

Well it would appear that Mr. O’Keefe’s 15 minutes weren’t nearly long enough for his liking so he and his crack band of nincompoops devised a new scheme. A bolder scheme with higher goals. Unfortunately their new scheme proved a bit more risky. And by that I mean they were arrested for attempting to bug Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone in her Senate office. This, in case you weren’t aware, is a federal offense bordering on espionage.

So far it isn’t exactly clear what O’Keefe and his crew were hoping to get out of these wiretaps. It doesn’t seem they put much thought into the operation at all apart from the possibility of listening to Landrieu’s phone calls, which may have amounted to exactly nothing. But if they were successful in not only breaching the Senate’s security which is designed to thwart exactly this kind of activity, which are in place to stop foreign intelligence agencies let alone a group of fuckwits from the College Republicans, did they honestly think that whatever they found would make bigger headlines than their own Federal Offenses? Sorry but I don’t think Freedom of the Press stretches quite that far when it comes to issues of national security.

So I’m enjoying this. O’Keefe needs to feel the heat on this. As does the man who signs his checks, Andrew Breitbart. Someone get be a bucket of popcorn.

There is a lot of anger and sadness in Minnesota today. And I’m not referring to our 2010 Winter Carnival Snow Sculpture competition being highly affected by rain. (Though that did suck.) No, today we here in Minnesota are yet again faced with the crushing disappointment of our Vikings not making it to the Super Bowl during a season that was like something out of a fairy tale. But we’re getting fairly used to it. I like to think of it as some kind of karmic payback by the gods of the sport for granting us four previous trips that we never won, but I digress.

Before I make my salient point, let me first state that Adrian Peterson, the running back that 90% of this league would fall over themselves to have in their own backfield, needs to learn how to hang on to that fucking ball. Dear Christ Almighty on Toast, when the fuck is he going to learn? And Brett Favre…well that was an incredibly stupid pass from someone who has a pedigree that states they should know better by now. And as I understand it, Packer fans are very familiar with this happening as well when he was with them. Our defense did just about everything they could and held that supercharged offense of the Saints very well. But a team that coughs up the ball five times has no place in the Big Show.

But now I need to state something that was clear to anyone who watched that last series in overtime. I don’t care who you’re a fan of, these facts are indisputable; in the order in which they happened:

1. That was NOT a first down.
2. That was NOT pass interference.
3. That was NOT a catch.

In three calls, the referees handed that game to the Saints. Granted, they let all kind of leading-with-the-helmet calls go that were undoubtedly meant to injure our players, but that final series was nothing short of breathtaking in referee ineptitude.

But…I’m a Viking fan. I’m used to it. And, again, any team that coughs up the ball that many times should be looking at other things to reflect upon in the off-season. But I have to say it’s hard to be a fan with this much perceived favoritism in the NFL. Because sometimes it isn’t just perception. Just ask the NBA.