TWGB: Art of the Deal

 

Trump claims he can free a journalist imprisoned by Russia, after he wins the election, but before he takes office, definitely. There's tons of reasons to be skeptical or, I would actually say--extremely appalled. Tom Nichols knows a bit about Russia, and he's pretty sure Trump is full of shit, but isn't the interesting part that he wants him there until after the election? 

I would add--isn't it pretty interesting he has this special relationship, and never used it during his presidency?

As a former wrongful detainee in Russia, I would just like to remind everyone that President Trump had the ability to get myself and Paul Whelan out of Russia for years and chose not to. I would be skeptical of any claims about getting Evan Gershkovich back in a day.

— Trevorrowdyreed🇺🇲🇺🇦 (@trevorrowdyreed) May 24, 2024

I mean--he did things that were great for Putin--but not for the US?  He thinks he has a relationship but what he isn't going to have is leverage because he is a soft weak pudding of a man who never cared about anything but himself. Because he made an imprisoned journalist, just now, about himself and his election. 

Sort of in the way he made a border bill about him, and deferred it until he was (he hopes) back in office, and could take credit. The way he shut down the government in 2018 because he panicked about his future and wanted border wall money when he no longer had control of the House. And what did he get?

Impeached. Because he was still making deals for himself and not doing whatever it was he promised he would do in office. 

Sandra Day O'Connor, 1930-1923

 

To the surprise of the conservative president who appointed her, the conservative first female Supreme Court Justice kept Roe v. Wade on the books. But on the other hand, try as I might to come up with something different regarding her being a trailblazer, I kept coming back to the Bush v. Gore decision. 

She wanted to retire and wanted a Republican to replace her. George W. Bush replaced her with Sam Alito. 

And Roe v. Wade was eventually undone. 

So?

I can't expect someone to have the foresight to realize that the dominoes lined up like that. On the other hand, it was still some kind of selfish decision on her part, and from the 2000 decision, a lot of nastiness flowed. 

So I'm still mad. And I'm not over it. 

And Forgive Us Our Debts

 

In another BFD kind of day, President Biden announced the forgiveness of student loan debt up to $10K for borrowers with incomes up to $125,000 ($250,00 if filing jointly) and up to $20K for Pell Grant recipients. This is going to help so many people--

The White House said that 43 million student loan borrowers will benefit and that as many as 20 million borrowers will have their full remaining student loan balances wiped out.

That will be very significant for those households. Due to debt obligations, people have put off on home-ownership, starting their families, and more. Adjustments to the payments owed will also give people whose debt has not thoroughly been retired welcome breathing space. It may not be what they hoped for, but it is a change in the right direction.

Of course, people have to complain. I'm not going to focus on the more left-based criticism that the debt forgiveness should have gone further because I'm in agreement with it--I am a Gen X kid whose working class to middle class family was able to manage my education, and I acknowledge my privilege. My degree was invaluable to me, though, and I encourage people to get a good education because the broader your horizons, the better your damn time here on this earth. I got a BA in English Lit., which is one of the most humanities of the humanities degrees. It means I am proficient in my mother tongue and can discuss works people have been reading for pleasure for a long time. 

We Don't Live in Bipartisan Times

Sen. @ewarren is 25 minutes into a fiery speech on the Senate floor about voting rights and the filibuster. Go watch.

“Today’s filibuster doesn’t encourage debate, it promotes cowardice.” pic.twitter.com/Nn3RbA68Yr

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 19, 2022

Professor Warren explains the truth--cowards can hide behind the rationale that "We can't get to 60, so what does taking a stand matter." That's what infuriates me about Manchin and Sinema right now. They are pretending that they are standing up for a principle of bipartisanship and not making the divide between Republicans and Democrats worse, but what they are really doing is failing to make a stand. Absent the filibuster, the votes fall where they may. 

We all know we'd be hard-pressed to find a Republican right now putting their vote on limiting state legislatures' ability to suppress voting because they are going to talk about federal power grabs and states' rights, and if that doesn't sound familiar! I'd love to make the Republican party expound at length on that subject so we could tell exactly where they stood. 

Please, have them defend everything from restrictions to mail-in voting to DeSantis' possible vote cops (I imagine crackers with bullet heads and necks exceeding their jawlines carrying blackjacks and being prone to saying shit like "You don't look like you're from around here" and "Who all is your people?"). In lieu of that, though, just based on our current composition in the Senate, I'd like Sinema and Manchin to put their vote where their ideals are supposed to be, let VP Harris settle the matter, and go forward with voter rights better protected.

Where we are now is at a stupid state where Senator Romney pretends it is a darn shame President Biden didn't reach out to him. If Senator Romney was so moved to think voting rights needed to be protected, he could have reached out his damn self. Senator Murkowski might be persuaded--but is she not a grown woman who understands politics? Ditto all GOP senators. If they have an opinion, fuck it, put it on the damn table, like grown people. But also, explain voter purges, and defend poll places miles from where some voters live, and long lines, and how unequal access impacts outcomes. And if that wasn't even the intent of such voter suppression laws in the first place. They need to be put on notice that they can't bitch about being called racist for supporting those "states' rights" bills if they can't defend the obvious demographic choices that made them what they are.  Put the GOP on the spot for what they have come to stand for, after the Voter Rights bill had been so universally approved-of not so long before. 

John Dean's Trip Down Memory Lane

I was skeptical about the value of John Dean's testimony comparing President Trump's actions in office with Watergate, and still am. It's not that I think the comparison is wrong--I don't! It's just that even after Nixon resigned (and was pardoned) we still got Republican presidents even though the madness of the criminality proposed or actually engaged in by Nixon and associates is actually mind-blowing when actually contemplated.

So we got Reagan and-Iran Contra (and I never could swear the October Surprise conspiracy wasn't a real thing, either). When George H.W. Bush got into office, he pardoned the handful of Reagan officials that had been convicted, and it seems pretty unlikely that Bush was as "out of the loop" regarding that affair as he claimed.

George W. Bush's presidency should have been the final straw. The pre-9/11 intelligence. The Iraq War. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib.

But how did Republicans treat Presidents Clinton and Obama? (Do I need to go into how Whitewater and Benghazi weren't about fact-finding but fault-finding?)

And now, you can't even get Republicans to read the damn Mueller Report (which, it was once crowed in front of tv cameras, exonerated Trump--until it didn't).

The double-standard view holds up even to this day, though. While I, or liberals in general, or even objective folks of goodwill, might Dean's comparison seriously based on the details we know of Watergate and the detail in the Mueller Report, and think, for example, a line of questioning intending to diminish his testimony based on an ad hom argument was poor, Rep. Matt Gaetz's description of Dean as having made a "cottage industry" of criticizing presidents will stick simply because he pointed out that Iran-Contra and, well, shit, half of what the Bush Administration did was worse than Watergate. There might be truth in it--but not to Republicans if they've never admitted it to themselves.

And after all, didn't Dean make money...on his books?

Look, Dean made a perfectly good swipe at Gaetz for possibly not understanding the rule of law issues involved because "Watergate was before his time". But I was still in diapers at the time, and I get it. The problem isn't when Gaetz was born, it's actually assuming you can treat Republicans like they weren't born yesterday. The environment of unaccountability they've created has served them well, and they aren't going to be shamed by something that happened 46 years ago, or 35 years ago, or thirteen years ago. Or a minute ago--unless you rub their noses in current events.

Where some might see the throughline from then until now, Trump loyalist conservatives will only see water under the bridge, because there is none so blind as those who don't want to see. Everyone is either dead and gone or alive and pardoned and reborn on cable news. It's a little harder, though, to get away from what's happening right now.  And now is what and when Democrats need to focus on.

Whether to Bury or Praise

There is something fortuitous in the historical placement of George Bush in wherever he happened to be in the course of his long life. He was fortunate in being born privileged, he was fortunate in surviving a brutal war. He was fortunate in politics, after a fashion. He married the love of his life, and one of his sons followed him in the White House. As lives go, it wasn't half bad. He was surrounded with admiration and love at the end of his life, and that's nothing to scoff at. We could all hope to do so well. 

He also benefited by being neither so wretched as Nixon or crass as Trump, and the halo of his dedication was in part burnished by the haplessness of his son's time in office, and the bar of doing politics had dropped to where service and decency, just by being part of one's make-up, were all that needed to be present to gloss over really harsh truths. But his record was mixed, and a pretty damn comprehensive blog post of the not-great bits was served by Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, so I'd say check that out for the stuff already said, and better than I would have, by him. 

As for me, I still simmer over 1988. This was the first presidential election I paid attention to, occurring after Iran-Contra, and in some way, my innocent soul thought Republicans should have been over, for at least this round. How in the world does a country accept Bush was "out of the loop" as a former head of CIA, and not think his principal job in taking office in the White House was to tidy up loose ends? I was all of sixteen and livid at the "pledge of Allegiance" nonsense and the entire crock of referring to Dukakis as an "ACLU card-carrying liberal" as if sticking up for the Bill of Rights was something to sneer at. Stupid wedge issue content (and maybe not the most competent campaign waged by Dukakis and Bentsen) dictated a win, and a pardon for several folks who participated in that debacle of literally extralegally arming a country that we considered a supporter of terrorism, to also extralegally support a faction in a war that wasn't any of our business. And cite the reason for these pardons as "patriotism". 

I still to this damn day don't know what American principles or interests were served by this thing. As with Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, it sits poorly with me as a violation of the concept that no one should be above the law. 

And the nomination of Clarence Thomas, whatever we think of his qualifications today or his sexual harassment concerns, was a slap in the face of civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall, whose seat he filled. As if this bland patrician looked on this black conservative, and gave no fucks for the vast difference in viewpoint but saw a certain blatant commonality, and rolled with it. 

I do not know the family or personally, any friends of George Bush. I knew I was slipping as a blogger when I tried to silver-lining the life of his beloved spouse. The War on Drugs,  and whatever crap example he set that made George W. Bush and Jeb Bush the politicians they were,  his poor response to the AIDS crisis, his feints to hardcore conservatism to try and obviate the claim he was a "wimp" which in some ways proved it--all stay in my memory as things that were part and parcel of his legacy, that should not be forgotten. 

And yet, in retrospect, he could have been so much worse. And he wrote lovely notes, and his family doesn't all suck, and his friendship with Clinton and Obama....? 

He was human, and we are all a mixed lot, and have redeeming features. He did his thing for charity, and I will allow I consider some of what people say about Carlyle Group and the defense industry and drawing arrows here and there from Halliburton/Dressher to the exploits in Iraq seems a bit paranoid. I can't dispute that the end of the Cold War would have been something difficult for any president to navigate. 

His family will bury him, and they can praise him as well. As well as can any of his loved ones. I am not in that circle, and I will tell the truth if I please. His civility was admirable. But we should not hurry to polish the reputations of those who have died when their legacies are still ongoing. And the stupid political postures of 1988 still resound in 2018. I can't shrug that off, or forget that Roger Ailes, who made Fox News, was one of his campaign advisors back in the day, and of course, the episode of peak Les Atwater--the Willie Horton ad. 

I am dry-eyed and unromantic about his legacy. We are here in it. And my Trump obit will definitely be even worse, come the day. I wish peace of mind to his surviving loved ones. (But not without clear memories.)

UPDATE: And just one other damn thing--he was for Brett Kavanaugh, and fuck him and his son and Brett Kavanaugh. But not the all the way, because none of them deserve the satisfaction. 

Cindy Hyde-Smith is Unreconstructed

There is a part of me that wants to understand the politics of the Deep South and how it would create a Confederate-signifying politician along the lines of Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith--why it might not occur to her that strongly advocating, for example, on behalf of Confederate vets and monuments there-of, wasn't necessarily a great look.

There is another part of me that entirely gets it, having lived the last forty-six years. I am not too young to know Reagan launched his candidacy for president against a gentle evangelist of the New South in Neshoba County just this close to Philadephia, Mississippi. And he extolled "state's rights"--which I guess and assume to this day means the rights of Brian Kemp to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Georgians and invalidate some number of votes and turn people aside from easily voting because of voting machines that were not available for a value of available that means installed in an accessible voting location.

If someone was looking to capture the South on behalf of the one-time party of Lincoln, Reagan sorted out the means so to do. And Cindy Hyde-Smith, having come up in a segregated private high school (and sent her kid to one), knew exactly the footsteps to follow in: if Reagan was once a Democrat whose party had left him, she, a former Democrat, understood that the Democratic Party had also left her (as in, we would not still have an unreconstructed Confederate, I guess).

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Well, Georgia still has me upset, and Florida could make anyone lose their rest, and as for Mississippi?

Goddamn! There are lines for absentee ballots, for a runoff, which is amazing to see.

"Mississippi Voters Wait in Line to Vote Absentee for Senate" by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via NYT https://t.co/JRH9sSwfn6

— Hellen Gehris (@hellengehr) November 24, 2018

Mississippi, look forward, not back.

CPAC is Just Such a Sell-out Anymore, Man

It's like, there was a day when CPAC seemed like a fringe festival where conservatives could really let their freak-flag fly and you could see Log Cabin Republicans play cornhole in the parking lot with Tony Perkins and stuff, but those days just seem like bygones.  I dunno. I mean, when the US President and Vice-President show up--that's pretty mainstream. When Nigel Farage (who for some reason keeps coming up in the Trump/Russia thing)  and Marion LePen get thrown up on stage to represent their particular type of nationalist movements (fascism!) it starts to lose that unique loosey-goosey uniquely American flavor of bigotry I've gotten used to from the CPAC folks. 

It is, of course, a thrill to have Wayne LaPierre of the NRA pretend that the Democrats are basically the same as European socialists and also want to take all the guns and melt them into roach clips.  I mean, that's the hit of the true crazy that makes CPAC such a rare brew. Having Dana Loesch indict the mainstream media for loving to see crying white mothers after an episode of gun violence for the sake of ratings was sheer vicious hate-watching--of course she wonders where the crying black mothers are (I guess she missed the BLM movement?) and fails to consider that maybe the NRA doesn't mind that part of the response to these episodes is also an uptick in gun sales and a flurry of activity from their paid-for congresscritters, so maybe they profit a bit from mothers' tears, too. 

It doesn't surprise me that a comment at the Ronald Reagan dinner Friday evening specifically addressed former RNC chairman Michael Steele by race. One could definitely point to shortcomings during Steel's tenure in terms of RNC party spending, but I think Steele genuinely tried to depict the GOP as still a "Big Tent" (a Reaganesque, if you will) party, even as the Tea Party movement and conservative media continued to show that the party was whiter, older, very straight and Christian and uptight. 

This party is Trump's now. The current RNC chair changed her name for this president. He is extolled as a great Christian by the theocrats, and no amount of money paid to porn stars or Playmates will disabuse them of that idee fixe. That he is uninformed and patently corrupt can't bother them (they are much the same, thanks). But how boring it all seems when the lurid, racist, theocratic, misogynist, gun-humping and ethno-nationalist stuff is all front page, rather than marginal thinking! Even the hate against journalism isn't anything you wouldn't have heard the good folks at Fox News say night after night. 

It still seems a bit boutique at times.  Ben Shapiro seems to have a weird need to bring up transfolx as if "nuh-uh" and "because I say so" are valid arguments, as if many people weren't already pretty clear that lived experiences are a unique kind of truth--but at least he addressed the idea that Trump lies. Although he did it in a speech where the audience also did a "Lock her up" chant regarding Hillary Clinton, for reasons that in 2018 I feel are some kind of psychological thing.

I can't see the humor in their parallel Bizarro universe. It has become too much a part of our shared reality to enjoy a thrill-ride though the carnival, when some of us feel we are trapped in a funhouse with malevolent clowns.

Merry Arms Race

It's Christmas already in Philadelphia, PA, from which I write my humble blog. I'm a Generation X-er. The year I was born, 1972, the season was marked by the Christmas bombing of Hanoi.  I grew up with a consciousness that the world could actually end because countries got very mad at one another. We even called it "MAD"--Mutually Assured Destruction. There was an understanding that if nation states got too far out of line, we would have a global catastrophe resulting in millions if not billions of casualties.

The millennials don't really have this experience. The people who grew up with 9/11 as their significant milestone of consciousness, or indeed, had that event occur before they were even really aware, might be more inclined to see war and violence as being a product of state and non-state actors performing acts of mass destruction at more or less close range. The threat of global thermonuclear war just wasn't as ever-present in their minds.

The idea of an "arms race" might seem like a curious 1980s artifact--as it should. We (the US) had an arms race with the USSR then. There's a curious idea that the USSR fell because the US simply outspent them into oblivion which might be conditionally true, even if the scenario is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. The SDI or Star Wars program, which was never a working thing, was scary to people who had already discovered they didn't always have the wherewithal to sustain working nuclear plants.  The weird thing is , the missile gap was always kind of like Iraq WMDs in the early Bush II years--we really had overmatched them considerably. We might have been caught off guard by a thing or two in the space race, but we really had produced a quantum fuckton more of fission-y boom-y things. But probably more importantly, the West also had blue jeans and Beatles records and a worldview that didn't suck. The wall came down alright--but it was because walls suck and people who put them up suck the worst.

The Campaign from 1964 and Draper Sterling

A lot of people might think that when the Trump Campaign fired Corey Lewandowski by phone, and he was escorted out by security due to some kind of coup arranged by the Trump children (especially Ivanka, who I guess is the brains of the group) that this was the news of the day--so not. That wasn't even the best bit of the day, even though it was ammmmaaaaaazzzing that Lewandowski could manhandle a reporter and even be arrested and charged, and it is like "No big"--until Trump falls behind Clinton in the national polls by so much! But yeah, that only looks cosmetically bad--presidential campaigns have personnel shake-ups all the time, especially when transitions are being made--and we think Donald Trump is going to PIVOT TO THE GENERAL ANY SECOND NOW.

Right?

But this weirdly addressed political campaign info dump on a Monday morning at the top of the news cycle makes no sense unless it was supposed to bigfoot some other, more awkward news--if I suspect that there is anyone kind of media-savvy in Team Trump, and based on the primary, could be. The sort of bad news--the Trump campaign is all kinds of broke--but this isn't new for them. The news that the Trump campaign only raised like $3.1 mill this month and has $1.3 mill on hand and owes something like $42 mill, and mostly uses Trump properties for its expenses meaning Trump is paying himself back--whoa! It's complicated, right? It's a lot like maybe the Trump campaign is just a giant funnel constructed to get GOP donations where Trump pretends to self-fund by "loaning" money to his campaign, but since the loans aren't forgiven--meh? The accounting stuff is probably boring to all y'all even if I think it's the most interesting thing I've seen in a forever. (Money nerd for life.)

But the cutesy thing where his web IT guys are "Draper Sterling"? Like from the tv series Mad Men? Are you shitting me?

Nancy Reagan, 1921-2016

It's very strange when you find yourself thinking about someone lately only to hear they have died shortly afterwards--that's what happened this week with Nancy Reagan. I blame the election year. Her husband has passed in 2004--also an election year, and someone had wondered aloud, not cruelly, if anyone knew how Nancy Reagan was doing, and whether she was following the election coverage. We've had scads of Republican candidates over the years compare themselves to Ronald Reagan. I was never a big fan, but the jist of the conversation had to do with the claims of a certain billionaire regarding his, erm, "presidential timber", and how this was a) not terribly Reaganesque and b) the sort of thing we didn't think a certain 94-year old lady would approve of much. And were she to die of shock, we wondered just which of the grasping assbites competing to sit in the Oval Office would be more sickeningly signifying about being an heir to the Gipper.

(My bet is on Ted Cruz. He lacks a shame-producing gland.)

And then, she actually had passed.

Of late, Nancy Reagan earned a measure of respect from me, anyway. It's mixed. She advocated in favor of stem cell research, and her kids are good eggs. She'd borne with dignity the treatment of her late spouse as a kind of saint, and after taking care of him through a decade (that we know of, more, I am certain) of Alzheimer's disease--a condition that is rugged on caretakers. She gave the impression of a person who looked frail on the outside, but was exceptionally tough within.

A little Late for World AIDS Day, But Aren't we Ever?

I fond myself transfixed by this video of White House press conferences regarding AIDs, and I think the thing I need to single out is the laughter. The stigma of being gay overrode the seriousness of the spread of a killer disease, and continued to do so among government officials and press personnel for some time. Right about this time, Rock Hudson tried to inveigh upon the White House to let him get treatment where he might actually get results. (He was turned down. )

Dick Cheney Gets A Little Char from Chris Wallace's Grilling

I think the exchange in this FOX News Sunday piece is a good reminder that even if the rationale for the Iraq war was supposedly anti-proliferation of WMD's and WMD-capability--the Bush Administration really wasn't much good at it.

Wallace made this key point:

Wallace pointed out that Cheney had eight years to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and failed to do it.

“You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years, and I think it was fair to say that there was never any real, serious military threat,” Wallace noted. “Iran went from zero known centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000.”

“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?” the Fox News host asked.

Cheney completely did not understand that this was a failure. He pointed to the invasion of Iraq as something that was supposed to have done some good there--but the actual facts are that no, the Iran nuclear program was never arrested by the invasion, and in fact Iran had an ever-greater influence in Iraq because of that invasion and the destabilization of the previous political infrastructure.

Which gives me a notion that Cheney was in part, operating under the Kissingerian "madman" strategy, where the monstrous destruction wrought in Iraq was supposed to serve as a caution to other nations to not even try with the US.

That would be goddamn stupid. Because if you became aware that your neighborhood was unsafe--wouldn't it make sense for you to arm yourself? That nonsense didn't even work in Vietnam. If looking like a country run by crazies was supposed to result in a draw-down, what in the hell was the arms race with Russia and the escalation in Afghanistan in the '80's about? Everybody got to buying weapons. It was the opposite of anti-proliferation logic.

Well, funny old thing--in his post-congressional life in the 1990's, Dick Cheney got a job at Halliburton and they kind of went around sanctions to sell multi-use gear to Iran that might have been useful in their nuclear program. (There was all kinds of wrongdoing in the 1990's by Halliburton though. But they were in good--that is to say bad, company--see Donald Rumsfeld and North Korea.)

But let's call all those little ways in which Bush Administration so-and-so's screwed-up to make things worse world-wide in terms of WMD mere mistakes.(And how could they do better, being the heirs of Iran/Contra and the Cambodian Campaign?) Would it not make sense then, for people who were journalistically inclined, to not actually ever rely on the words of such people as experts in anything ever again? Just because they are very likely either abominably stupid or quite obviously lying?

I do not understand why failures are promoted in the media and why I should feel so happy to see one journalist even bother to address some aspects of the failure. This should be the media's regular job. Cheney should have been called out like an SOB in 2003.

The CPAC 2015 Poll is in

I've really not made a big point of following CPAC this year because I finally get that I am not the audience this whole shindig is for. Of course, part of the deal is that the prominent voices of today's conservatism are supposed to be showcased. Yes, some of these people are running for POTUS. But that doesn't mean I have to take it totally seriously, because the likelihood that, for example, the CPAC straw poll actually ever meant anything would probably mean that we were experiencing Ron Paul's second term. And we are not. So, if Sen. Rand Paul has enjoyed his third CPAC poll win, this has more to do with inheriting his father's libertarian apparatus, and less to do with anything like being able to win in 2016. (I think.)

WI Gov, Scott Walker has come in a respectable second, despite or probably because he compared union workers to ISIS, which would no doubt haunt him if he made it to a general election. His claims that facing protesting union folks prepares him for foreign policy is kind of strained, I think. And making the "Reagan" connection is so obvi. Try harder, you try-hard!

Iran is A Country With Which We Might Have Shared Interests

President Palling Around With Terrorists Good God, Mr. President. To partner with Iran is to trust the enemy,... http://t.co/RX1iu2sx3o
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) November 9, 2014

Good God, Sarah Palin! Did you know that there were contacts between Sainted Ronaldus Maximus and the Persian Menace?  The trading arms for hostages kind?

She realizes, does she not, that Iran shares an enemy with the US in ISIL--which is a vicious terrorist organization that no one should support, right? She doesn't think we should appease ISIL by cutting out their enemy, Iran, from our joint operations against them?

If she even knows where these countries are, or who these people are. A brainiac she isn't.

I'm just saying. She pals around with Alaskan separatists, John McCain pals around with who knows who in Libya or Syria, eh? Some of my ancestors felt some kind of way about sassanach. But no, the actual country of Iran isn't quite the same thing as terrorists at the moment. Because real terrorists are beheading Christians and Yazidis and all them in Northern Iraq. I can stand with even Iran to deal with the likes of them.

Is she trying to be some kind of ISIL-lover? I can't even...

The Potemkin President Turns 100

I want to celebrate the life and times of Ronald Reagan appropriately by celebrating how his administration was epic fail.  Many bloggers have already beat me to this point, but I think the two good things I can say about Ronald Reagan are: Ron Jr. doesn't totally suck, and, the suckage of the Reagan years plus the double-plus ungood suckage of Bush I made me a committed "L-word".