Political quotes of the moment

[Cramulus]

from our favorite, IOZ: http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/08/darth-nader.html

The "activist base" . . . oy, you've got to love this self-conception: the scurrying loyalists of a top-down factional hierarchy perceiving themselves as engaged in activism, like the catering staff considering themselves titans of industry because they lay out the water bottles before a meeting of the board of directors. The "activist base" persists in believing that The Obama is An Historic Candidate who was handed An Historic Moment and is in the process of squandering it, when plainly Obama is a very ordinary administrator at a fairly ordinary moment doing an entirely ordinary job. Empires get embroiled in simmering conflicts in the provinces. Recessions happen. The imperatives and intertia of the empire are larger than the current emporer. He'll probably get drummed out after this term, and the next guy will probably benefit from a modest economic recovery that will ensure him eight years, even if he's got bad table manners. You heard it hear first. The motto of this blog bears repeating: plus ça change, motherfuckers.

[Cain]

Glenn Greenwald just scored a critical hit on White House Press Sec Robert Gibbs

You may think that the reason you're dissatisfied with the Obama administration is because of substantive objections to their policies:  that they've done so little about crisis-level unemployment, foreclosures and widespread economic misery.  Or because of the White House's apparently endless devotion to Wall Street.  Or because the President has escalated a miserable, pointless and unwinnable war that is entering its ninth year.  Or because he has claimed the power to imprison people for life with no charges and to assassinate American citizens without due process, intensified the secrecy weapons and immunity instruments abused by his predecessor, and found all new ways of denying habeas corpus.  Or because he granted full-scale legal immunity to those who committed serious crimes in the last administration.  Or because he's failed to fulfill -- or affirmatively broken -- promises ranging from transparency to gay rights.

    * Continue reading

But Robert Gibbs -- in one of the most petulant, self-pitying outbursts seen from a top political official in recent memory, half derived from a paranoid Richard Nixon rant and the other half from a Sean Hannity/Sarah Palin caricature of The Far Left -- is here to tell you that the real reason you're dissatisfied with the President is because you're a fringe, ideological, Leftist extremist ingrate who needs drug counseling:

   

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

    During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

    "I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy."

    The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."

    Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn't be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

    The White House, constantly under fire from expected enemies on the right, has been frustrated by nightly attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for abandoning the public option in healthcare reform; for not moving faster to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay; and for failing, so far, to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military. . . .

    Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.

    Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington "in America," and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.

So, to recap:  (1) The Professional Left are totally irrelevant losers who speak for absolutely nobody, and certainly nobody in Real America who matters; but (2) they're ruining everything for the White House!!!  And:  if you criticize the President, it's only because you're such a rabid extremist that you harbor a secret desire to eliminate the Pentagon -- that's how anti-American you are!  You're such a Far Left extremist that Dennis Kucinich isn't far enough Left for you, you subversive, drug-using hippies!  You're so far to the Left that you want to turn the U.S. into Canada.  As David Frum put it today:  "More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base."

The Democrats have been concerned about a lack of enthusiasm on the part of their base headed into the midterm elections.  These sorts of rabid, caricatured, Fox-News-copying attacks on the Left will undoubtedly help generate more enthusiasm -- more loud clapping -- for the Democrats.  I know I'm eager to go canvass and clap for Democrats after reading Gibbs' noble, inspiring vision.  If it were Gibbs' goal to be as petulant and self-pitying as possible, what could he have done differently?

Perhaps one day the White House can work itself up to express this sort of sputtering rage against the Right, or the Wall Street thieves who destroyed the American economy, or the permanent factions that control Washington.  Until then, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with White House explanations that the Real Culprits are not (of course) them, but the Professional Left, that is simultaneously totally irrelevant and ruining everything.  I'll give credit to Gibbs for putting his name on this outburst:  these are usually the things they say anonymously and then deny afterward on the record that it's what they think.

[Iason Ouabache]

"It all makes sense when you realize this is a country that wanted to have a beer with an alcoholic. TWICE." - @OTOOLEFAN

[Cain]

http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/great-moments-with-mr-nixon/#more-13316

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?...I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Incidentally, I have a copy of Kissinger's White House Years Diary.  All 2000+ pages of it.  If Henry had a problem beyond sociopathy on a scale barely matched by Genghis Khan, it was that he never stopped writing.  Harvard introduced a rule about dissertation length after being forced to read his 600 page doctoral thesis, as well.

[Juana]

Just because it's worth remarking on how deeply perverse it is for Glenn Beck to want to "reclaim the civil rights movement" because "we were the people that did it in the first place," here's Beck's take on civil rights counterposed with a marginally important figure within the movement, Martin Luther King, Jr:

   

Beck: "the movement of the 1960s has been perverted and distorted" by people "like the Reverend Al Sharpton telling people that Martin Luther King's dream was really about redistribution of wealth...I don't remember that. Really?"
    King: "...we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power."

    Beck: "Who were the civil rights marchers?...They weren't crying for social justice, they were crying out for equal justice."
    King: (in his speech "Social Justice") "we will be able to go this additional distance and achieve the ideal, the goal of the new age, the age of social justice."

    Beck: "They have infiltrated our churches" and "confused the gospel with government-run programs."
    King: "If America does not use her vast resources to end poverty ... she too will go to hell."

http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/reclamation/
For a supposed history buff, he's awful ill-informed, assuming he means it and isn't just doing it for ratings, etc.

[Cain]

Well given the Regency press Wingnut Approved version of history, not to mention his love of Cleon Skousen, I'm surprised his take on historical events isn't approaching LaRouchite/Icke levels of wackiness.

Anyway, it seems America suffers from complexity addiction.  An old quote, from Containing Arab Nationalism:

The genius of you Americans is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which makes us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing.

[Don Coyote]

America, our politics are a Rube Goldberg machine.

[Cain]

Also this:

Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme

    From the East Asian Correspondent, Sept 1, 1939. -- In a course of action praised by many as "far-sighted" and "tactically brilliant," the Japanese government has sworn its allegiance to the Axis powers led by white-supremacist Nazi Germany. In a formal statement, Japanese leaders declared, "We wish to be counted among the loyal allies of this back-stabbing, racist hate nation."

    Following the announcement, Japanese General and military leader Hideki Tojo told reporters, "We are pleased to enter into an alliance with the paranoid, xenophobic government of Nazi Germany. We anticipate a deeply enriching exchange of our military aid with their deep-seated hated of our non-white heritage."

    Tojo went on to say that the "unbeatable team" of Germans and Japanese will one dominate the industrialized world as "Aryans and those hated by Aryans, working together."

    Likening their war instincts to those of "a very advanced clan of yellow apes," German Chancellor Adolf Hitler praised the government and military of Japan.

    "I salute you, chinky-dinky rat men, who have been given life by the confused hand of some long-dead pagan deity," he said. "When Germany stands victorious on a conquered Earth, and Aryan supermen wipe out the undesirable mud races one by one, your like will surely survive to be among the last to be exterminated."

[Triple Zero]

Also this:

Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme

    From the East Asian Correspondent, Sept 1, 1939. -- In a course of action praised by many as "far-sighted" and "tactically brilliant," the Japanese government has sworn its allegiance to the Axis powers led by white-supremacist Nazi Germany. In a formal statement, Japanese leaders declared, "We wish to be counted among the loyal allies of this back-stabbing, racist hate nation."

    Following the announcement, Japanese General and military leader Hideki Tojo told reporters, "We are pleased to enter into an alliance with the paranoid, xenophobic government of Nazi Germany. We anticipate a deeply enriching exchange of our military aid with their deep-seated hated of our non-white heritage."

    Tojo went on to say that the "unbeatable team" of Germans and Japanese will one dominate the industrialized world as "Aryans and those hated by Aryans, working together."

    Likening their war instincts to those of "a very advanced clan of yellow apes," German Chancellor Adolf Hitler praised the government and military of Japan.

    "I salute you, chinky-dinky rat men, who have been given life by the confused hand of some long-dead pagan deity," he said. "When Germany stands victorious on a conquered Earth, and Aryan supermen wipe out the undesirable mud races one by one, your like will surely survive to be among the last to be exterminated."

I'm trying to think of someone I could give this book who might appreciate it

[the last yatto]

      Washington's toleration for differing religions was made evident by
      his order to the Continental Army to halt the observance of Pope's Day.
      Pope's Day was the American equivalent of Guy Fawkes' Day in England. A
      key part of Pope's Day was the burning of the effigy of the Pope. In his
      order, Washington described the tradition as, "ridiculous and childish"
      and that there was no room for this type of behavior in the Continental
      Army. www.deism.com/washington.htm

[Cain]

From a 2004 governmental report on Iraq:

This report will also attempt to broaden understanding by recalibrating the perspective of the reader. The Regime was run by Saddam and the calculations he made concerning WMD were based on his view of relevant related factors not ours. Optimally, we would remove the reader temporarily from his reality and time. We would collect the flow of images, sounds, feelings, and events that passed into Saddam's mind and project them as with a Zeiss Planetarium projection instrument. The reader would see the Universe from Saddam's point in space. Events would flow by the reader as they flowed by Saddam.

I'm not sure if the author of this particular paper is a poet or a madman.

[Kai]

Jesus christ.

We really ARE fucked, if that's the sort of insanity people take for granted.

[LMNO]

Why the hell don't I have his job? 

[Cain]

That was Charles A. Duelfer, by the way, author of the Duelfer Report by the Iraq Survey Group on why Saddam doesn't have any WMDs.

He also goes on to say

Ideally, the reader would see what Saddam saw. Such a transmutation is impossible. However, this report will provide the reader a handrail to grasp in the form of a time line that will also serve as a constant reminder of contemporaneous events that filled the field of Saddam's view.

and

Analysts were asked to look for something they may not expect or be able to see. A challenge like that faced by scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

I know Paul William Roberts once accidentally took Ecstasy before interviewing Saddam, so I'm wondering if there is some rogue Iraqi intelligence agent drugging people responsible for writing reports on the country and making them look like dumb stoners.

[Cramulus]

"In fairness, we've been building 'ground zeros' near Iraqi mosques since March 2003. "
                — Twitter / Jason Mustian