The Stupidest Staff in Congress
Lawrence O'Donnell pretty much covered this well with his usual cheerful nastiness. To recap, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's staff sent a letter to the DoD asking for clarification on a story they'd supposedly read about GI Bill benefits being given to detainees at Gitmo. The story was just that: a piece of satire on the well-known Duffel Blog, "the military version of the Onion."
After making merry with it for about 6 or 7 minutes, O'Donnell then gets serious and makes a good point: The latter day Republican Party has been wrenched so far to the right by the Tea Baggers that what would've been considered a terminable offense 20 years ago, in this case the political version of the Darwin Awards in mistaking satire for reality (as if that's never happened before in Republican circles), is nowadays de rigueur. The McConnell staff letter betrays the same paranoid, frothing-at-the-mouth hatred for the government that we saw three and a half years ago at Democratic Town Halls during the health care reform debate.
It really doesn't matter to staffers of Republican leaders such as McConnell what the facts are and vetting stories, no matter how over-the-top they are, seems to be an irksome proposition to these people. In a way, Republicans and their Tea Bagger staffers are like the white collar version of terrorist suicide bombers: Their own incendiary initiatives will surely cost them dearly and they may not even be successful at taking out their targets but by God, they're going to try, anyway, and the consequences be damned.
There's no longer any correlation between taxpayer dollars and an expectation of any competence from government, no longer any concern that many people now working for the government are unworthy of taxpayer dollars. According to O'Donnell's much more competent staff, the person who likely wrote that memo to the Department of Defense had just graduated from college last year, which is to say mere months ago.
It brings to mind the 24 year-old moron and college dropout that George W. Bush installed at NASA to censor the reports of actual scientists. In Republican circles, there's no attempt to vet the people whose job it would be to vet and all you have to do is lie about your college credentials to get a job in the corridors of government power.
And it isn't the hoaxes that conspiracy-minded Republicans that we should be paying attention to: It's the hoaxes perpetrated on the American taxpayer for being duped time and again into paying the salaries of these morons and lunatics, these self-loathing bureaucrats who hate the truth and facts so much that unvetted fabrications are preferable.
posted by jurassicpork @ Friday, February 22, 2013
5 comments
5 Comments:
Bring on the meteor!
[sigh]
88He asks how stupid one would have to be to believe the article. How about stupid enough to believe that the President is a secretly gay Kenyan Muslim socialist whose parents managed to sneak a fraudulent birth announc ement into a Hawaiian paper 50 years ago, knowing that their son would be the first African-American elected President? THAT's how stupid one would have to be... and that is how stupid the entire Republican party is these days.
I suspect, with a few notable exceptions (By "notable", I mean, "Ought to be in four point restraints in a rubber room and rectally force-fed Haldol 4 times a day"), the Republicans know it's all bullshit. But since Obama agrees with them on virtually all their agendas, they grasp at straws. All in the name of getting the black guy out of the White House. It's really as simple as that.
Republicans ought to just save their time, energy and verbiage by boiling down their primary objection to one simple, heartfelt word: "Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! He's a nigger!" They should just have their Michael Richards moment and be done with the little farces of birth certificates, Sharia Law and a gay marriage.
Ladies and Gentlemen, and Other Dogs: The Right wants to recreate, in law, the wink-and-a-nod "equality" of the post-WW2, pre-CORE and SNCC era, if not the Old South.
In this new America, Wealthy [and principally White] People would de facto own All Other People as chattel -- by making sure the gap between Owners and Workers widens.
Things "we [i.e., Business] can no longer afford" would be eliminated -- such as collective bargaining, OSHA, FDA and EPA regulations. The Working Americans would exist in a cycle of Work -->Buy substandard everything at inflated prices -->Eventually die.
There would be other things, too, to make certain groups happy: Mandatory prayer; psychiatric "reducation" for LGBT citizens; an automatic death sentence for performing abortions, or "Acts Against god".
Textbooks would resemble those now used in Texas. There would be a national campaign to show that 'a college education for all' leading to better jobs and paychecks is a 'wasteful and excessive' notion of the past.
In sum, the American future the Right wants is a symbiotic balance between a small minority's ability to amass wealth, and the less-wealthy rubes to dispense cruelty and sadism disguised as "A Return To Greatness".
Not to put to fine a point on it or anything.
The problem that places like Duffel Blog are having is that it's quite difficult to satirize the Tea Baggers, on account of how far out there they really are. What seems ridiculous and obvious satire to people who can think is mainstream Murka to the 'baggers.
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