Wingnuts: Hopelessly Confused edition

I think this is a really important observation. Conservatives cannot imagine that people would or could laugh at them. It's why they don't understand that Colbert is satire.
Atrios:

The whole Sarah Palin "phenomenon" has been pretty weird. I've tried to figure out why she's so loved in wingnut world, where even they have to occasionally pick up on the fact that she's pretty absurd. And I guess I come back to what I usually do: they love her because they thinks she pisses off liberals.

We're not angry, we're laughing.

Josh Marshall: Sucks To Be Them?

Are Republicans losing control of the tea-bagging movement? That's what it looked like in Texas this weekend -- and possibly around the country as well.

I so love it when wingnuts comment. One of the best features is wingnut grammar and spelling. Plus, like Palin, they love them some CAPS and exclamation points!!!!! Here's what Anonymous said.. in response to a previous post:

Like a wounded animal, Liberal attack when threatened or wounded. Olbermann and the rest of these Liberal blogs ARE LIARS.

The "Paid For" at the bottom of the email is required by state law on all correspondence from a political party. They emailed a notification of the tea party happening not financially supporting it.

Lets face it liberals your scarred, your president is loosing approval and your policies down right stink.

Rock them back on their attack mode heels Mr. Curry. Good job!

If i were you liberals I would focus on getting ready for 2010 and 2012 because the Republican are coming and we are going to take this country back.

BTW: Thank you Mr. Obama for helping promote the Republican party, you have done more to help us then Bush did over the last 8 years.

via bluegal at C&L:

You betcha, Governor Palin has done nothing in the past week to move up, down, or off of Batboy's list.

Sully: Even The Total Nutters Are Off The Bus Now

Some of you may have come across a neo-fascist blogger, Ace of Spades, who makes Glenn Beck seem like Jim Lehrer. All of this is to say: even he can't quite put up with the degenerate dorks who now constitute much of the Republican base. Here he is inveighing against the commenters he has spent the last few years whipping into an anti-elitist frenzy:

And I do think I am taking off the week. You guys only seem to want to talk about sarah palin and furthermore you only want to hear the same thing -- she's running, this is a great move, she's now perfectly poised for the race, etc. It's nonsense. And I hardly need to blog about it, because you all seem to know the words to the song. So you don't need me as part of the chorus. You can sing the same words well enough without me. I am really tired of this relentless nonsense and occasional nastiness whenever someone is believed to have departed from the conservativey correct line.

In the end, the tiger eats them all.

Kurtz (TPM): A Martyr To The Cause of Herself

Palin: Politically speaking, "If I die, I die."

Benen: BRZEZINSKI OFFERS FAKE AMERICANS A LESSON ON 'REAL' AMERICA...

Back in October, the McCain/Palin campaign caused a stir when it started drawing up dividing lines among Americans, based on their perceptions. Sarah Palin, for example, referred to smaller areas as "the real America," apparently not to be confused with the "fake" America.

I'd thought, at the time, that the political world learned a lesson. Arbitrary, romanticized notions of who does and doesn't qualify as "real" in the United States is a fool's errand. We're all Americans, regardless of our personal characteristics or the size of our hometown, and drawing up dividing lines is more than a little insulting -- especially to those of us who may not meet the conservative standards for "real."

It's a real shame MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, who seems to be moving further and further to the right with each passing week, didn't learn the appropriate lessons from last fall. This morning, in an incoherent defense of Sarah Palin, Brzezinski said people attended Palin rallies during the campaign because "they agree with her." (Brilliant analysis. People attend rallies for politicians they like? Remarkable!)

Brzezinski added, "Look at the polls out there. Look at where people stand on life. Look what real Americans think.... In the cities where there are a little more liberal elite populations, you're not going to find what's representative of America."

Asked who the "real" Americans are, Brzezinski, perhaps unaware what the question meant, said, "I think [Palin's] views actually do." I don't know what this means. Perhaps I'm not "real" enough.

Brzezinski went on to complain that some in the "mainstream media" don't agree with Palin, but "real" Americans do. She said, more than once, "Look at the polls."

This is just sad. Four out of five Americans live in urban areas (for the record, I'm not one of them). Most Americans do not want to see Roe overturned. Indeed, most Americans reject Palin's worldview on most social, economic, foreign, or constitutional issues. Most Americans voted for and continue to support President Obama. I know this because I took Brzezinski's advice and I "looked at the polls."

It is the height of arrogance for a television personality to lecture her viewers on who qualifies as "real" and who doesn't. Even for "Morning Joe," this was a ridiculous and offensive display.

• Sully: The Latest Lie
  

  Anne Applebaum is unfooled:

  Perhaps the explanation for this [tsunami of scorn] lies in the final part of one of Palin's statements: that "Washington and the media" cannot understand her decision because "it's about country." In other words, for the past nine months, Palin has avoided difficult questions, preferring Runner's World to another Katie Couric interview; she has dragged her family into the spotlight when it suited her (baby Trig was in Runner's World, too) and grown angry when the spotlight became too strong; she has eschewed reason and logic (not to mention spelling and grammar), yet reacted in horror when her critics were unreasonable and illogical in response. Then, after all that, she smugly asserts the right to decide who is a patriot and who is not. It's not about "country," in other words, it's about hypocrisy. And Sarah Palin is full of it.

Benen: SEEKING PROTECTION FROM THE 'DEPARTMENT OF LAW'...

Sarah Palin, after avoiding public attention for a few days, spoke to quite a few news outlets today, and stuck to the line that she felt compelled to quit because the series of ethics allegations against her -- all of which, she said, lack merit -- were too big a burden and distraction.

It prompted ABC News' Kate Snow to ask a reasonable question.

[W]hen I asked Palin if she ever decided to pursue national office again, as she did less than a year ago when she joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the race for the White House, wouldn't she encounter the same political blood sport? Can such ugliness ever be avoided?

Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

"I think on a national level your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said.

There is no "Department of Law" at the White House.

It's tempting to think Palin may have been referring to the Justice Department, but it's not "in the White House," and it doesn't have the authority to "throw out" charges against the president. Maybe she's thinking of the White House Counsel's Office, but again, it has the ability to defend against allegations, not "look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out."

Indeed, the very assumption that a president is somehow shielded or protected against allegations is itself misguided.

Palin continues to be hopelessly confused about the basics of government. Maybe now that she'll have some free time on her hands, she can brush up on Civics 101.

• Sullivan adds:

  Maybe she was thinking of the Office of Legal Counsel: you know the lawyers hired by Cheney to let him do whatever he wanted, including the torture of human beings. Maybe she was thinking about her own view of the First Amendment - that it protects politicians from journalists. Or maybe she's as massively ignorant and completely ga-ga as she seems.

• Atrios adds:

  The whole Sarah Palin "phenomenon" has been pretty weird. I've tried to figure out why she's so loved in wingnut world, where even they have to occasionally pick up on the fact that she's pretty absurd. And I guess I come back to what I usually do: they love her because they thinks she pisses off liberals.
  
  We're not angry, we're laughing.

Think Progress: Joe The Plumber Says Immigrants Should Get ‘The Hell Out Of Our Damn Country’

While protesting government spending at Houston’s Independence Day Tea Party, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher stated that American taxpayer dollars would be best spent on the mass deportation of 12 million undocumented immigrants:

WURZELBACHER: I believe in making sure our country is safe first. I believe we need to spend a little more on illegal immigrants. Get them the hell out of our damn country and close the borders down. We can do it. We’ve got the greatest military in the world and you’re telling me we can’t close our borders? — That’s just ridiculous.

Watch it:

Wurzelbacher dedicated a private interview to saying that he’s tired of the government “sticking its hand” in his “back-pocket” and urging the government to “pull its head out of its butt.” Apparently he’s against bailouts and the stimulus bill, but he completely supports spending approximately $206 billion over five years, or $41.2 billion annually, to hunt down and deport all the undocumented immigrants living in the US. Joe probably doesn’t realize that such a policy would also mean a loss of $1.8 trillion in annual spending and $651.5 billion in annual output.

Joe’s demented view on immigration and government spending was echoed by tax protesters at tea parties across the nation. Jack Martin, Special Projects Director of the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) was a featured speaker at Virginia’s Prince William County American Freedom Day Tea Party. The Anti-Defamation League warned that white supremacists and neo-Nazi hate groups were planning to take advantage of the tea parties to disseminate their anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant views and recruit new members.

Marshall: Stickin'

Me today, me tomorrah, me forevah!

Sanford remains defiant, refuses to resign.

Kurtz (TPM): Rick Perry Looking Almost Normal

TPM Reader KM:

I'm sweltering down here in Houston and reflecting that it wasn't so long ago that Texas had the looniest governor in the nation. My how the bar has been raised.

Yglesias: Class and Sarah Palin

Ross Douthat on Sarah Palin:

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

I think the implicit idea here that the real class struggle in the United States is between graduates of fancy colleges and graduates of less-fancy colleges is pretty blinkered. Consider the Census Department’s information on educational attainment in the United States of America:

As you can see, less than a third of the population has a bachelor’s degree. But both of Sarah Palin’s parents belong to that educational upper class. And so does Palin herself. Meanwhile, I think it’s telling that Douthat’s idea of a counterpoint to Obama’s Ivy pedigree is Palin rather than, say, Joe Biden of the University of Delaware and the Syracuse University College of Law. Biden strikes me as an excellent example of the fact that a person can attend some not-so-fancy universities and yet be both enormously successful and widely acknowledged to be a smart person with a command of the issues. Palin, by contrast, is someone who Douthat acknowledges needs more time “to bone up on the issues.”

And that is the key to people’s complaint with Palin; not that she attended North Idaho College but that she ran for Vice President and spoke out on a range of issues without seeming to understand any of them. That’s a big deal, and it’s not mere snobbery to point out that it’s a big deal.

Meanwhile, John Sides points out that educational attainment has relatively little impact on public approval of Palin:

When you consider that college graduates and people without bachelor’s degrees typically disagree on political issues, there’s nothing noteworthy about this rather small gap. College graduates are somewhat less conservative on culture war issues than non-graduates, so you would expect them to be less friendly to cultural conservative politicians irrespective of their personal qualities.

Benen: MAYBE BOEHNER IS SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME IN DC....

One of the hallmarks of a politician who's lost touch with his or her constituents is when the politician no longer knows what's going on back home.

Take House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), for example. Boehner told Fox News over the weekend that the economic stimulus package was "nothing more than spending, spending, and more spending." In reality, the recovery plan also included a massive tax cut, and spending was the point of the stimulus. More importantly, though, Boehner insisted, "In Ohio, the infrastructure dollars that were sent there months ago -- there hasn't been a contract let, to my knowledge."

Boehner really ought to keep up on current events in his home state before making a bogus claim like that on national television.

When U.S. House Minority Leader John Boehner told a newscaster Sunday that not a single stimulus-funded road contract in his home state of Ohio had been let, he was wrong.

The Ohio Department of Transportation has OK'd 52 stimulus-funded road and bridge projects at a cost of nearly $84 million.... An ODOT spokesman called Boehner's statement "disappointing."

And Scott Varner noted that ODOT had just OK'd six more stimulus road projects which will cost about $43 million.

Late yesterday, Boehner issued a statement, complaining that the contracting process has been "absurdly slow moving," and reiterating that he preferred non-stimulative tax cuts to government spending.

Boehner didn't (or couldn't) explain why 52 approved transportation projects in four months represents a "absurdly slow moving" process, or why he made a transparently false claim about economic developments in his own state.

• from the comments. . .
  

  It's worse than that. Boehner himself had previously commented on the start of many of these projects.

  He's not ignorant of what's happening in Ohio. He's a flat-out liar.

  Posted by: shortstop on July 7, 2009 at 9:21 AM