...always tells you when you're wrong.

....by Golly I hope not, because I'd like the Democrats to win. But if you tell me we should get out of Iraq, oour foreign policy does more harm than good, and that the moon is made of green cheese manufactured by mad scientists, you've lost me.

socrates(!)johnson

HRH.... Maybe such mutterings from under the bridge threw me off somewhat, but I failed to detect the sarcasm. Not to say that our foreign policy is 100% counterproductive, but 51% would certainly be a bare minimum. And anyone who still asserts that staying in Iraq would benefit our interests, rather than just enlarge our humiliation, is concerned about Bush, not the democrats. As for the last part; it's Shooteresque in its irrelevance, and juxtaposition with the other two very debatable points.

It's too bad that someone less wacky than Paul isn't saying some of the other things Paul said, as Glenn noted in that post. Now, respecting the constitution and dailing back military misadventures can be conveniently lumped in with loopy economic theories and downright scary racial ones by our sagacious punditocracy, and therein lies the pity.

My apologies, S.J., for taking your words for the faux concern that showers us all in its gentle benevolence around these parts.

My personal sarcasmometer is probably set a little too high at times, while a bit low for others.

Thanks for clarifying, and for sharing my laments about the medium....

In the WaPo today, knock me over with a feather, Broder decries Democrats for not compromising enough with Bush.

I know you're all flabbergasted.

But the best part is his statistics. He sees grave trouble in the frighteningly low 32% approval ratings of this congress, as compared to the stratospheric 36% of the last one, and offers his eminently Serious prognostications as to why. I won't bore y'all with that...same old, same old.

But at the end of the same column, he dismisses an EIGHT point advantage congressional Democrats have over Republicians as "marginal," and needless to say, sure to evaporate if they don't Broderize, pronto.

He gets paid to write this? Oh, yeah, they pay Shailagh, too. Never mind.

If cocktailhags ran the world, the north would have seen the south's secession for the gift that it was. There we had the chance to rid ourselves of a bunch of bloodthirsty, racist, religious nuts that have been expensively and pointlessly nurtured ever since, to make our lives the living Hell we have today, and we blew it.

Who cares if there were still a dentally challenged, slaveholding, and universally despised backwater to the south if we all could have been spared Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and George f*cking W. Bush et al?

The amount of money and lives wasted to be saddled forever with a bunch of bigoted, resentful products of cousin breeding, who wave the stars and bars in one hand and the bible in the other, and now have led us to this sorry pass... makes my blood boil.

Can we please stop talking about it?

Disclaimer: the opinions here do not necessarily reflect the views of the author, they are offered solely to save a dying thread, and to prevent me from polishing off all the Christmas wine.

LWM and bystander....

Admittedly I was just blowing a little smoke. Come to think of it, there is an excellent half bottle of scotch lying around, should circumstances require its deployment.

Actually, I was enjoying, and feeling belatedly edified, by the discussion, but it led me to making a little profit/loss analysis in my head.

I thought of the wonderful food, places, and people, but then drifted into the voters and electoral strategies, and the rest is history.

Indeed, Bush and Cheney don't hail from there, but their current employment would certainly have been a risible impossibility, would that we were now contemplating a border fence along the Mason-Dixon line.

Pedinska...

Drink something out of a pineapple while you're down there... That always makes me feel better.

It is especially appropriate that you mentioned Nixon at the end of your post. Just imagine a time when nearly all the top men in the White House actually ended up in jail; the only person to get off scot free was Nixon himself. And that pardon landed Ford an early and ignominious retirement.

Imagine Fox News dismissing Watergate as "a desperate witch hunt against a popular President," and a "mean-spirited vendetta by a far-left" Washington Post. Would that there was still such a thing as the Washington Post.

We've definitely come a long way, baby.

If we could bring back a little of the 70's, I'd even wear those clothes again.

Another nauseating little tidbit in today's New York Post, I mean Times; a glowing and early review of Jonah Goldberg's magnum opus, Liberal Fascism. Rushing into print in time to goose sales, the reviewer manages to find "witty intelligence" (!) and "ideas as well as insults" in this estimable work by one of our great thinkers.

Treated as a mere quibble is the fact that it only trashes democrats and blithely skips over McCarthyism, Watergate, and the Reagan cult; never mentioning that those little omissions undermine, if not render prepostrous, the whole thesis of the book.

It is truly the most desperately fawning "review" I have seen in a long time, and the damage it does to the credibility of the book review section is devastating. Maybe the NYT ought to put the review upside down on the tail end of the op-ed, as they have done at Jonah's home, the LATimes, and just call it a day.