Tuesday

Fred Barnes and My love/hate relationship...

Ol' Freddy is one of those rarest of breeds...A human being that can make me absolutely furious with the utterance of one sentence, and then in the next, have me hysterically laughing at his sheer jack-assed-ness. A friend sent me a link to Fred's op-ed piece in today's WSJ, and I'll be damned if Fred hasn't gone and dunnit again! I'll share (my emphasis):

(A special h/t to my buddy Sacit for pointing me to the article. How he can manage to read the WSJ opinion section everyday is a source of great mystery for me.)

Well, he sure as crap doesn't waste any time diving head first into the fuckery...

Let's start with events. The debate over whether a war gone bad in Iraq was the primary cause of sweeping Republican losses in last year's midterm election will never be resolved. Clearly the war hurt, more than a little. Just as clearly, a turnaround in Iraq would help enormously.


The war didn't help anyone win, but no Fred, exit polls showed that corruption and general sucktastic suckiness were the main reasons the Republicans lost the 2006 election.

But even if the "surge" is as successful as it appears it might be, there's a problem. While public support has increased recently, the war still faces deep-seated opposition.


Well, pigs might fly out of my ass while I'm typing this post. And where the hell is he getting this information that "...public support has increased recently." Vomit in mouth.

Grass roots reconciliation (in Iraq) is...spreading.


That's because in areas that were once diversely populated with both Sunni and Shia, one side (usually the majority) has literally run out of people to ethnically cleanse...Yeah that's some fucking reconciliation. Ass.

Mr. Bush can't erase the memory of his inept handling of Hurricane Katrina. But if another disaster occurred and the president responded effectively, that would counteract the memory of his Katrina performance.


The handling of a disaster bit...that is just frickin' precious. And what would Bush's "smooth" handling of the disaster entail. Declaration of martial law, clergy response teams, Gitmo like detention centers built on American soil, suspension of the next election, declaring himself as "president for life"??? Just wondering. So the Republicans should hope for another Katrina-like disaster? Aside from the fact that comments like those are the some of the most culturally insensitive things I have ever heard, where does Freddy boy think this sudden "surge" of competence is going to come from? Seriously, is it just going to materialize out of some previously undiscovered dimension? Fred - news flash: This administration could fuck up a one float parade. ASS!


When General Petreaus reports next month on progress in Iraq...


Wait a second...didn't we already discover (like...yesterday) that the savior of the Middle East Petreaus isn't even writing the report. The White House is. Jeebus man, even Faux News got that one right; although, they definitely played it down as no big deal.

On fiscal issues, Democrats foolishly dismissed the president's insistence on cutting $22 billion from overall discretionary spending, claiming it was a puny amount. To them, it is. To the public, it's not. A veto war on spending bills is likely to work in Mr. Bush's favor, though not if weak-willed congressional Republicans cut and run.


"A veto war..."? That would be a pretty one-sided war considering the president is the only member of government with veto power. And as for the Democrats thinking that $22 billion is a puny amount - It is puny, compared to the over $500 billion that we have spent in Iraq. "...weak-willed congressional Republicans cut and run." Or actually do their fucking jobs and follow the will of the American people for once, and stop turning American politics into a neo-conservative dog and pony show. You ASS!

The recipe for Republicans is to stop acting like, well, Republicans--that is, Republicans of recent vintage. In Congress, they've been soft on earmarks, the source of so much corruption. They practically invited Democrats to trump them on ethics and lobbying reform. And they've allowed their obsession with illegal immigrants to get out of hand. This drives away Hispanic voters and leaves the impression that Republicans are small-minded, ungenerous and nasty. The worst offenders are the presidential candidates, who would be wise to tone down their rhetoric on immigration.


How the hell are the candidates going to be able to "tone down their rhetoric" when they must, MUST, secure the votes of the 30% of the country that suffers from a Germany-circa-1938-like xenophobia regarding all things brown?
What frickin' universe is this guy from? Holy shit - I can't take much more of this.

At this point in the article, things just start to get out of hand. So ridiculous that I actually started to laugh.

Transforming a negative image hardened over a period of years is no easy task. Still, there's a lot Republicans can do. First, they should clean house of Republicans caught up in scandal. Forcing two or three House members and at least one senator to retire would involve more than friendly persuasion and no doubt provoke strong resistance. But the effort would attract national attention--favorable attention, for a change.


"...two or three House members and at least one senator..." Oh, God! Good luck with that. {insert my uncontrollable laughter here}

As Karl Rove has noted, Republicans need a big idea. The best available is the one Mr. Bush abandoned: ownership. Allowing private investment of payroll taxes for Social Security would only be a start. An Ownership Society would allow individual Americans, rather than government, to control how and where their health care, public education, 401(k) and IRA funds are spent.


Yeah, or huge corporations, but hey, that's the Republican way. Here's the problem ass-clown: There are a hell of a lot of Americans out there who don't have to worry about who controls their health care, education, 401(k) and IRA funds because they can't even dream about affording such luxuries...They vote too, moron!

At the moment, wherever Republicans look there's mostly bad news. Democrats are raising more money. Their presidential candidates are generating more excitement. Polls show the public identifies with them by a wide margin. Yet there's a path to recovery, possibly even quick recovery. Republicans ought to take it.


I have a path for recovery (for the U.S. at least), possibly even a quick one...All the Republicans should pick up a gun, do an extended tour in Iraq, spend a week in an Iraqi's shoes, then come back to the U.S., put down the gun, get an assembly line job at a factory, then have the factory get shut down and their jobs outsourced to somewhere in the Asian sub-continent, lose their house because of their sub-prime mortgage, get a new job as a migrant worker, then get deported while their American-born child gets sent to a foster home in this country.

That would probably kick start the recovery process.

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