Does it matter if a politician tells an outrageous, howling lie? Of course it does, it could end his or her career.

Does it matter if a lunatic Republican tells an outrageous lie? Yes it does — how else are they gonna get TV time and fire up the base? Hell, the truth won’t do that for the wingnuts, that stuff is BORING.

Hilarious, screeching lying is the feed of fear farmers, and there’s plenty here. And the biggest bull-milker would be Louie Gohmert.

Reported on June 27, Gohmert (R–TX, of course) took to the House floor, saying that he talked to a retired FBI agent who knew of terrorists bringing in pregnant women to have children here so that the kids would have American citizenship. Then they’d return home, train the kids to be terrorists, and then send the grown-up anti-American murderers back to the states to “destroy our way of life.”

And thus was born the “Terror Babies!” knee-slapper. Sensing a good thing — volcanic bugshit — Gohmert was happy to flog it again, about a week later. But this time, with a twist.

Appearing on Fox Business Channel (?), he trotted out his “Terror Babies!” again. But, oddly, he now had a completely different source for the shocking revelation: someone he personally knew heard about it first hand. From the grandmother of two of the Terror Babies.

You see, as Gohmert and his people were flying to the Middle East on a passenger plane, one of them, just minding his own business, had the woman sitting next to him inexplicably detail the whole thing. Turns out it’s a program being run by Hamas.

Grandma married into Hamas, her son-in-law is Hamas, and she simply had to tell the stranger sitting next to her how they assured the babies’ citizenships by flying her pregnant daughter to HAmerica. Now, some day, you can bet she’ll send them back to, you know, murder us all.

This is some serious stuff. Serious enough that, some day, the bullcrap may sprout legs and walk out of Texas. Just not this week.

Texas State Rep. Debbie Riddle has some shocking news for Anderson Cooper: here come the “Terror Babies!”

COOPER: Representative Riddle, you told my producer that pregnant women are coming here as tourists, having babies, and then going back home — quote — “with the nefarious purpose of turning them into little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm.” You said it’s part of an organized terrorist element and could cost us lives. Where did you hear that?

RIDDLE: Uh, that is information that is coming to my office from former FBI officials.

WOAH — she’s got Gohmert beat. Her office has talked to several FBI guys.

COOPER: But you have no actual evidence?

RIDDLE: Other than that coming from former FBI folks.

COOPER: Can you tell us who these former FBI folks are, and what evidence they have or what evidence they’ve shown you?

RIDDLE: At this point, uh, I’m not going to reveal that.

Come on, Anderson. Do you expect her to tell you she howls at the moon?

Are you a news junkie? Do you follow current events and love a good story? Me too.

Then tell me if this looks familiar — this is some coverage of the controversy over the latest iPhone. You know, the antenna problems and Apple’s reactions to consumer complaints and so on. This comes to us from billionaire Jimmy Lai’s Taiwan and Hong Kong media factories:

What the hell was that? Other than hilarious? That was the future of tabloid news.

Jimmy Lai didn’t get to be so successful by waiting for good things to happen to him, he makes good things happen. And when the publisher of popular Next Magazine, “which combine(s) tabloid sensationalism with hard-hitting political and business reporting,” gets a juicy story, he knows how to get people to read or see Next’s version of it.

What he didn’t know how to do, until now, was to get his hands on the critical video or images of a big story when they didn’t exist. That was frustrating. Until he came up with the answer to his problem: he’ll just make the video himself using live action animation:

It’s a bit of genius, really. The whole thing puts the jokers at Fox News to shame.

Since you know you’re really in the news business to pump schlock into the shallow sewers of pop culture, why bother with the pretense of hiring on-air personalities? Why pay them ridiculous amounts of money, indulge their egos, tell everybody how trustworthy they are, spend years waiting for them to develop a relationship with the audience?

The only reason they’re there is to mouth your pre-written yellow journalism. They’re just puppets for your sure-fire pop sensationalism. Why not just cut out the airheads and their egos and get straight to the point, right? You wanna know what went on in that hotel room with Al Gore and that masseuse? I’ll tell you what went on, right here:

Forget trying to get Bill O’Reilly to report that stuff — one way or another he’ll screw up the message and insert himself into the middle of the story because he’s a self-important idiot. You can get your animation people to write, act, film and animate the whole thing in a matter of hours for far less than a day’s pay of O’Reilly’s bloated salary.

Better yet, the clip does what O’Reilly could only dream of: it shows people the story. That’s what they really want. Who wants to watch self-important jackasses read things on air? Fuck that nonsense. Show me the news. Show me all of the news, I want to see it.

Lai is only too happy to oblige. And his animation unit are no slouches, in any respect. They are savvy, they are hip, they know American pop culture like the back of their hands and they are great at putting clips together. This Sarah Palin clip is brilliant — it’s the best thing I’ve seen all year. Be sure to catch the screen crawls during the Fox News bit:

Taking the piss out of the rich and self-important, that’s what’s going on here. It’s as classic a goal of the wildly successful cheap journalists as there is. Though it may be too much for Americans to buy into — I’m not sure why, Fox’s reporting is nowhere near as faithful as some of these clips — it’s not going away any time soon in Jimmy Lai’s world. Like all tabloid news, as long as it’s spirited, timely, contains a bit of humor and a molecule or two of truth, people will gobble it up.

Say, did you hear about Justin Bieber’s internet pranksters?

Thanks to Think Progress, Media Matters and Michael Moore.

More Fox scumbaggery to pass along. The President addressed West Pointers graduating on Saturday, and the media recorded it.

Fox News tried to edit and air the clip to make the President look bad, but got caught red-handed:

Obama’s particular praise for the Armed Forces begins around 11 seconds in, and the ridiculous audio edit cuts in at 31 seconds. The echoing of his address is clearly audible until then:

The second half of the clip, coming after the one minute mark, is the whitehouse.gov recording of the same speech.

First, from the Wall Street Journal. Mackubin Thomas Owens (stop laughing, that’s his name):

The glue of the military ethos is what the Greeks called philia—friendship, comradeship or brotherly love. Philia, the bond among disparate individuals who have nothing in common but facing death and misery together, is the source of the unit cohesion that most research has shown to be critical to battlefield success…

The presence of open homosexuals in the close confines of ships or military units opens the possibility that eros—which unlike philia is sexual, and therefore individual and exclusive—will be unleashed into the environment.

And Ollie North, on Fox News:

Stunning assault on the all-volunteer military, the very best in the world.

Barack Obama now intends to treat them like lab rats in a radical social experiment, and it can be very, very detrimental. Not only does he want the Congress to repeal the law, Secretay Gates as much as said “I, Secretary Gates, am going to selectively enforce the law…” Now, here’s what’s next: NAMBLA members. Same-sex marriages. Are chaplains in the U.S. military going to be required to perform those kinds of rituals? Do they get government housing?

This is too easy.

DEBUNK: Sixty six thousand gays in our armed forces.

RELOAD: Gays are two point two percent of total force.

Don’t let anyone tell you that what happened Tuesday night, the Coakley loss, Scott Brown’s easy win in the Massachusetts Senate race, wasn’t a political bomb going off. That was a violent explosion, a complete disaster.

After all the epic machinations and manipulations necessary to pass the healthcare bill, — maybe single payer, but that’s a no-go, public option is the thing, naw it’s gone, now it’s saved, Lieberman just killed killed it, maybe Snowe is on board, no she’s not, how do we end-run Stupak, how can we get Ben Nelson on board, cut him some pork, when is the Senate vote scheduled? — the exotic trophy ‘supermajority’ that was everything, that made the whole thing possible, disappeared, poof, overnight.

Unbelievable. I doubt I’ll ever see it again in my life. And I have no idea why no one thought of defending it until about ten days ago, when it was way, way too late.

And, for aural punctuation, accompanying the long faces on this side are the sounds of millions of political orgasms on the other. Sounds like these:
– A Blue State Turns BROWN!!!
– Revolutionary Victory: Republican Scott Brown wins Ted Kennedy’s Senate Seat
– The Scott Brown Election Is A Referendum On The Establishment
– Massachusetts Miracle: Election night liveblog; Update: BROWN WINS, COAKLEY CONCEDES
– Brown Wins! Dems Taste Tea, CNN, MSNBC Fun To Watch, Amnesty Toast

Anybody could’ve predicted the reaction and momentum swing if Coakley were to lose. So, Coakley could never lose. But it wasn’t even close.

Good lord, this is some sort of historic embarrassment. Why didn’t anybody seem to care?

The answer? The leader of the Democratic Party, the President, Barack Obama, wasn’t up to the task. Like it or not, he asked for the helm, so it’s his responsibility. Yeah, but we all know he’s too busy. His responsibility, though, doesn’t require he do the actual work: technically he hires the entire executive branch, and they execute his governmental responsibilities. So where was his political right-hand man, the heavy-hitter to do all this critical work? If Obama’s not looking out for his own healthcare legislation, someone else better be.

You’re thinking David Axelrod? You gotta be kidding me, forget it. He’s a p.r. guy, a gun for hire, a “specialist in urban politics.” I wouldn’t ever count on him to step outside the Obama bubble. No, what I’m talking about is a national political party animal, right out of the smoke-filled backrooms. A stone-grinder of Democratic politics first and last, his pockets crammed with wet knives, fresh lists and plenty of chits.

Where is the President’s Karl Rove? It all should have been left to him. But, right now, he doesn’t exist.

Rove was the political boss of the Bush years, the ‘genius’ who got the single worst President in history a second term. This is the sort of guy we need: someone who can look down the road a couple years (or a few weeks, please) and start pushing pawns and pulling levers in order to give the Democrats the edge. You know, so that we can finally manage to get something done.

Remember how you chafed at Karl’s ridiculous idea of the ‘Permanent Republican Majority‘? The silliness made him an American political legend:

President George W. Bush called him “the architect” of his reelection victory and he has been the president’s chief strategist from the beginning. But Karl Rove is much more than a political guru, he is the single most powerful policy advisor in the White House. Frontline and The Washington Post joined forces to trace the political history and modus operandi of the man who has been on the inside of every political and policy decision of the Bush administration, including the current battles on Social Security, taxes, and tort reform. For Rove — observers say — enactment of the Bush agenda is a way to win the biggest prize of all: a permanent Republican majority.

Well, how badly do you wish we’d had even one operator in the administration who’d managed to look ahead just one month? Who’d have taken immediate charge of the pathetic Coakley campaign? Dragged Obama to Massachusetts on four successive weekends to talk up the now-gone Senator Kennedy and healthcare reform and ‘I’m counting on you to do the right thing in Teddy’s name’? Karl Rove would have been on top of that long before the good Senator’s death.

The hard truth delivered this morning is that the Democratic leadership are still playing a 20th-century political game, one they’d forgotten Rove already trumped twice in the 21st. Because of it, they’re flat out incompetents. It’s true — what else can you say of the folks who produced this political provenance for the open seat: John F. Kennedy, (Kennedy friend) Ben Smith, Edward Kennedy . . . Scott Brown? Cosmo centerfolds everywhere, Bay State Senate seats are now in play.

Well, being incompetent won’t cut it any more. With majorities in both houses, riding high in the polls, anybody can do that work, that’s pretty easy. All of 365 days later, shocked and embarrassed, they’ll never have it easy again. Take a look at what’s in store:

First, the Republicans now have the momentum. Seeing a Dem getting her ass kicked in midnight blue Massachusetts has terrified every Democratic Representative and Senator in anticipation of 2010 and 2012. Forget any political capital being risked for good things — if a bill or issue isn’t going to pay off immediately in their states and districts, they’re a lot less likely to be interested.

Second, the Tea Partiers and Fox News aren’t just weirdos and racists any more, they’re the regular folks in America. They’re politically relevant, they’re what’s happening in America, they’re what’s just happened to Massachusetts. So now everybody will have to listen to them. And with more and more people listening, they’ll tee off on the administration and Democrats even more viciously than before. It’s Obama and his people that are out of touch — did you catch the President sadly coming around two days before the blowout? (And how clueless did that look? No way ‘Rove’ lets that happen.)

Third, the Democrats have to manage some serious calisthenics to save their historic healthcare reform legislation. Without which, the last half of 2009 is wiped out and the Republicans are handed an historic and bloody victory. That mess likely kills any chance of real reform for two decades. Terrific.

How could the Democratic leadership not see any of this coming? How badly do you figure we need our Karl Rove now?

Media Matters has it covered. Except for Ancash (Peru) in 1970, it’s the worst, most devastating earthquake in the Western Hemisphere in over a century. But Fox ‘News’ isn’t interested in it.

REPORT: Top Fox News programs devote scant coverage to Haiti earthquake

On January 13, Fox News’ three top-rated programs for 2009 — The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck — devoted a combined total of less than 7 minutes of coverage to the earthquake in Haiti, instead choosing to air such things as Beck’s hour-long interview with Sarah Palin, Bill O’Reilly’s discussion of Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, and Sean Hannity’s advocacy for Massachusetts candidate Scott Brown’s Senate campaign. By contrast, the content of MSNBC’s three top-rated shows underscored the significance of the Haiti disaster; Countdown, The Rachel Maddow Show, and Hardball devoted a total of more than two hours to the earthquake.

Liberals have a reality bias.

Don’t you just love it when Democrats go on Fox News in order to impress them with their spunky independence, intelligence and charm?

No? Me neither.

What a fucking clown.

Raw Story repeats that he may have misspoken: ‘Joshua Holland at AlertNet gives Koch “the benefit of the doubt” and assumes Koch meant to say “hundreds of thousands” of Muslim terrorists. Even so, Holland argues, that suggests Muslim terrorists aren’t doing their job very well.’

I’m not buying it yet. He seems absolutely emphatic with that number, which is in keeping with his pale ‘vast majority’ assessment. Even if he meant hundreds of thousands, it’s still shockingly idiotic, just a thousand-fold less so.

Errr . . . hmm. I only know this: Ann Coulter’s thoroughly defeated me, I can tell you. I don’t even know where to begin . . .

[insert commentary on Coulter's familiarity with either male anatomy or bombs]

[*sigh*...alright. The underwear bomber got on the plane with a roughly 6-inch packet of PETN, weighing about 80 grams. That's roughly the same as 32 pennies. But copper is far denser than a simple chemical, about 8 to 1 in this case. So if you just stuffed more than 250 penny-packets of TNT under your foreskin, you, sir, are the evilest rhino on all the savannah . . . ]

This is the sort of stuff you want to hear from television news reporters, especially ones who have no clue as to what Buddhism is:

Would this be the ‘fair’ or the ‘balanced’ part of Fox’s coverage? If other outlets, like CNN or CBS, are too timid to tell Tiger Woods which god he should worship, this would be the ‘balance’ thing.

BILL O’REILLY: Let me be very bold and fresh again. Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough, to handle the most powerful job in the world?

“I believe that I am because I have common sense, and I have, I believe, the values that are reflective of so many other American values, and I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the, um, the ah..kinda a spineless..a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and and a fat resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles Americans are, could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership, I’m not saying that that has to be me.”

This guy is a thoroughly rancid talking head who Fox trots out to throw around nasty shit. See here and here and here and here.

It’s too early to say what the massacre at Foot Hood was–we just don’t have enough reliable information about the mass murderer, Hasan, and his thoughts and motives to say what his intentions were. But, generally, a terrorist act is a small part of a large overall plan. Terrorism usually has large political aims, and a single act doesn’t likely change anything, including even the perpetrator’s goals, if he survives.

If Hasan acted out of extreme emotional stress without any thought as to what his actions meant in a larger context, then I don’t see how you call that ‘terrorism.’ The facts that he was being deployed, was adamantly opposed to it and was increasingly distressed as the date approached probably point in the opposite direction, but we’ll see. Because of the great symbolism attached to terrorists’ acts, the dates they choose to attack are not generally random.

This, for example, is clearly terrorism.

New Jersey school children ‘singing’ a Christian spiritual song? But about Barack Hussein Obama instead of Jesus? Piling praise on the guy just because it’s February, which is Black History Month?

They’re trying to kill the children. Where the fuck did these lyrics come from, mister? There needs to be an investigation, followed by a gutting, and then perhaps a war.

Angry Callers Mistake NWA School for NJ Elementary School

Officials in one Northwest Arkansas elementary school says people across the nation and Canada are calling them, angry about a You Tube video that shows the students singing a song about President Obama. But they say it’s all a case of mistaken identity.

It was a video that sent Springdale’s Bernice Elementary Principal, Debbie Flora, into a slight panic. “We did not know what they were talking about. We’ve had calls from Texas, Tennessee, Quebec, Maryland. Um, some of them did not use very kind language when they called the school. But they were mostly mad.”

…they were also amazingly stupid and racist: these are straight off the Fox Nation website that hosted the article and video…

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Dago Red

Barrak Hussein Obama….sez: m-m-m, When your hair is thick and nappy, Afro sheen will make it SNAPPY . M-m-m

Saturday, September 26, 2009 at 09:20 AM

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