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As long as I’m asking rhetorical questions and making futile pleas, I’d like to add one more. Please stop doing shit like this:

Jeff Darcy phones it in (like much of the media)

Seriously, I know it’s hopeless to call for anything else but that doesn’t change the fact that this is fucking bullshit.

“Congress” is not the cause of America’s debt-ceiling time bomb. Republicans in Congress are.

In its official editorial on debt politics, The Economist does everything it can to pick at Democrats on this issue, and then having made those token efforts acknowledges that “…Mr Obama and his party seem a model of fiscal statesmanship compared with their Republican opponents.” Their generally conservative-leaning Lexington columnist goes further, calling this whole farce

a problem entirely of the Republicans’ own making. The reason for this crisis is that instead of just raising the debt ceiling in the customary way so that the government can pay the bills Congress has already run up, the Republicans decided to point a pistol at the American economy and threaten to pull the trigger if they did not get the spending cuts they wanted.

Seriously, what the fuck are the Democrats supposed to do, here? (more…)

Republicans, at least per ads, seem to be latching on to this “no blank checks” phrase, at the moment. And, um: really, what the fuck?

Guys, your party controls the House of Representatives now. Plus, even in Obama’s first two years, your party had an effective stranglehold on the Senate, which has in no way been diminished, and you have the Supreme Court pretty well tilted in your favor as well.

So before you get all worked up in a lather over Constitutional checks and balances, etc., stop. The checks and balances are in place, and, at least when it comes to blocking President Obama’s “agenda”* are working quite well.

And the checks and balances, in this case, are you, you twits.

President Obama doesn’t have a blank check, dipshits. If he ever did he doesn’t now. The midterm elections have been over for most of a year, congratulations, you won; you have placed a “check” on the Obama presidency, and can mark that goal off your list. What do you want to do now?

Yet again I feel like Pappy O’Daniel; “we can’t run re-form! We’re the incumbent!” Earth to GOP: you can’t run against the government in Washington, right now. You are the government in Washington. So either resign your seats en masse, and stick to radio and television where you don’t really need to offer anything more than outrage about out-of-control government, as that seems to be all you really want to actually do… or else come up with a platform of more than just “stop the government!” because braying about a need to restrain the federal government is fucking ludicrous when you control at least half of that government.

You god damn asinine dumb fucks! Shut the fuck up already and quit being talking-point automatons! Like now!

Gah!

* Forget having an agenda; at this point I think Obama might be fairly considered delusional if he even thought he could have an agenda just now. I don’t want to give him a pass on everything (see, you yutzes, this is not even a point of contention!), certainly, but for the moment “goals for improvement” probably have to be restricted to better crisis management, and inspiring grand strategy set aside for a little while as completely irrelevant amidst current events, no matter how good it might be. What a multiple cluster fuck.

You’ve probably read how Al Gore has called out President Obama for his duck-and-cover non-approach to climate change and any sort of progressive agenda on energy or the environment, generally.

I don’t think I even need to comment directly on that; I’ve mostly made my statements on those issues and see no call to rush out another one. I do, however, want to deliver a rebuttal to the snotty, sneering, pinheaded little example of “tut, tut” punditry posted by Frank James at NPR.org.

James begins with a condescending little head-pat, congratulating Gore on style for “one of the piece’s pithiest passages,” then having established this as the high-water mark promptly begins pissing and moaning about every substantive point.

Kicking off the “tut, tut” routine, James opines that “[Gore's] disgust for the news media have [sic] generally handled the climate-change issue is readily apparent,” implying that Gore is obviously placing himself outside the realm of what Paul Krugman calls “Very Serious People” through such a blatantly immoderate attitude. (This of course makes an astonishing contrast with NPR’s agonized, breast-beating guiltfest when a right-wing critic takes aim at perceived media faults in a far-less-erudite manner.)

Later on, James returns to the media, pontificating that Gore “mostly glosses over how that sea change has made media outlets rely more on the Trump and Sheen stories to draw audiences to their web sites. To a large degree, news outlets are responding to their consumers by giving them Trump and Sheen.”

James rakes Gore over the coals for failure to satisfactorily address this or that; the spare declaration “Gore doesn’t really deal with these questions” is obviously meant as a devastating kill-shot. Naturally, though, Mr. James has nothing to say  about the appalling implications of his own defense of celebutard journalism. Or about the directly-relevant point made by Gore, and even quoted in James’ post, that “The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business.” (more…)