Mindless Bush supporters greased the skids for the Great Recession, and maybe now they reap the rewards. Chaos is unpredictable.

Mike Huckabee, the last Republican candidate standing against John McCain for the Republican presidential nod at the end of 2008, is just an outsider to all the current Conservative hub-bub.

Mike Huckabee rips CPAC

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee blasted the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday as outdated, nearly corrupt and unrepresentative of the conservative movement.

Huckabee, a 2008 Republican presidential contender and potential 2012 candidate who had spoken at the conference for years, said the reason he blew it off this year was that the meeting has become dominated by libertarian activists.

“CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years, one of the reasons I didn’t go this year” . .

Meaning that CPAC is ” . . less Republican” in the sense of ‘a lot less willing sit through the same old cob-webby Christian Huckabee spiel.’ Mike was once a convenient friend of the religio-political power cabal that turned the country inside out. He doesn’t understand why his message is no longer thrilling.

Huckabee said the rise of the tea party movement had “taken all of the oxygen out of the room,” rendering the venerable conference far less relevant than it had been in previous years.

“Where CPAC was historically the event, the tea parties are having their own events all over the country and a lot more truly grassroots people are getting involved because of the tea parties,” said the former governor.

So when grass-roots activism arises out of the sleepy Conservative wing, that’s not current, relevant? Sounds like a case for yesterday’s news, not today’s.

Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts

. . Although senior administration officials say that no policy determination has been made to emphasize kills over captures, several factors appear to have tipped the balance in that direction. The Obama administration has authorized such attacks more frequently than the George W. Bush administration did in its final years, including in countries where U.S. ground operations are officially unwelcome or especially dangerous. Improvements in electronic surveillance and precision targeting have made killing from a distance much more of a sure thing. At the same time, options for where to keep U.S. captives have dwindled.

“Over a year after taking office, the administration has still failed to answer the hard questions about what to do if we have the opportunity to capture and detain a terrorist overseas, which has made our terror-fighters reluctant to capture and left our allies confused,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Friday.

Capturing terrorists has got to be a difficult, dangerous task. It risks our people and property, and it strains international relations.

They may pretend to believe it to be the ultimate weapon against the terrorists, but I’m not buying they’d be so forgiving upon the deaths or captures of our own during one of those dangerous operations. The Republicans would be howling screaming mad at Obama and the administration, and there’d be charges of stupidity, incompetence and recklessness flying all over the place.

Clearly, the technology and the capabilities of the drone programs have sharpened, and, with better intelligence, the anti-terrorist forces have extended ranges and strike capabilities. Why shouldn’t Obama put this all to good use?

Just because they’ve gotten a lot better at taking out terrorists doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any easier or less risky to capture them, does it?

Bush Official Criticizes Obama For Killing Too Many Terrorists

Just how unpopular are President Barack Obama’s anti-terrorism policies with his Republican critics? Even when he’s killing terrorists they find flaws . .

“That doesn’t mean I think they are not illegitimate,” he added. “No, we have every right to kill the other side’s warriors. But at what cost? When we do not have an effective detention policy the only option we have is to kill them before we can detain them. And if we don’t detain them, we don’t know what they know and what they are up to.”

The realities of detention are a bitch:
1.) Abduction.
2,) Transport.
3.) Incarceration.
4,) Interrogation.
5.) Production of intel.
6.) Assessment of intel.
7.) Action.
8.) Assessment of action.
9.) Assessment of source.
10.) Legal processing.
11.) International politicking and relations.
12.) Life-long housing.

Yes, they are. CPAC yesterday:

Bush Official Criticizes Obama For Killing Too Many Terrorists

Just how unpopular are President Barack Obama’s anti-terrorism policies with his Republican critics? Even when he’s killing terrorists they find flaws . .

“That doesn’t mean I think they are not illegitimate,” he added. “No, we have every right to kill the other side’s warriors. But at what cost? When we do not have an effective detention policy the only option we have is to kill them before we can detain them. And if we don’t detain them, we don’t know what they know and what they are up to.”

I’m certainly no counter-terrorism expert, so I’m not embarrassed to admit I’m confused by this.

But here I go: If we knew pretty much everything about all the terrorists out there, wouldn’t we then . . kill them? Starting with the leaders, kill them all, wipe them out? Isn’t that the best possible realistic outcome for us in order to stop them cold?

– Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is dead, say officials

– Al-Qaeda leader killed in North Waziristan drone strike

– Son of feared Taliban leader killed by missile fired by American drone

This isn’t good enough?

This is a strange one. There’s some satire, and then there’s someone who merely skims it to criticize it on its face. Strange enough. Except the purpose of the piece was to point out the hopelessness of vital satire in an environment that’s over-wrought and partisan. So Michael Barone fell right into it.

It begins with Rochelle Gurstein writing in the New Republic:

The Baby Lottery
A rational redistributive plan.
Rochelle Gurstein

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people “earn” as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might “level the playing field,” as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property–and let’s face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn’t always work out so well–how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Every child is finally given a fair shot at the ‘good life’ in the greatest country on Earth. Races caring for each others’ babies creates a colorblind society. Knowing your ‘familial’ child lives with somebody else makes sectors and strata of society genuinely interested in the well-being of the once ‘outsiders’ — you don’t know where your kid ended up, so it’s important for everybody, rich and poor, to do well. You fight for the other because that’s probably who’s raising your own.

Yeah, it’s insane, nothing is more coveted than your own flesh and blood. And your family and your heritage are the first things you are, and that’s fine. And, certainly, forcing the well-off to submit their children into perhaps poverty (there’s plenty of that) would be mind-numbingly, tyrannically cruel. But, then, no one deserves it, right? That’s how satire goes: it’s to expose essential truths by way perhaps of a wild ‘proposal’.

Michael Barone, he of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Examiner, took only a moment to read a few words, sniff a liberal rat and crank out a column:

She is kidding, isn’t she?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

I’ve been reading the New Republic for decades, even though (or perhaps because) it’s a wildly uneven publication. It can publish as thoughtful and intellectually rigorous a figure as William Galston, whose every word is worth serious attention. And it can publish some real garbage. In the second category (I think) falls what the website calls “Our New Columnist’s Rational Plan for Redistributing Babies.” The “new columnist,” Rachel Gurstein, writes, “how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?”

That’s right, not even close to her name.

It turns out (I think) that she’s kidding; her citation of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is one tipoff. But her proposal has some roots, as she notes, with the famed and in some liberal quarters revered political philosopher John Rawls. He argued that all public policy proposals should be assessed from the perspective of one who does not know into what station of life he or she is born. It turns out that when you do this you end up opting for a cradle-to-grave welfare state (or at least Rawls did). The problem with this, I have long thought, is that we aren’t born this way, we are born into families (or some other child care situation), we are raised in a particular milieu which is only part of a larger society and at a particular point in history.

In other words, “While I recognize this proposal is a satirical one, I would pause to add this: life simply doesn’t work this way. So this is a bad idea.”

Cough. Or: “Yes, yes, it’s satire. But it’s bad politics, you know.”

Stupefying. Well, to sharpen all the 90-degree vertices of his analysis, Barone adds:

So while Rachel [sic] Gurstein isn’t really suggesting that babies should be redistributed at birth, it seems that the idea is in some way appealing to her—even while she presumably understands that it will sound appalling to the very large majority of Americans. There are clues here to why the Democrats’ health care policies are so unpopular with the American people.

Amazing. Just brilliant. But it gets better, if that’s possible: the point of Gurstein’s piece wasn’t the utopian gambit or comedy. It was that in this wholly bizarre and hyper-partisan political world, the preceding satire seems to have become pointless ( . . and perhaps Barone should have read the whole thing?).

The lack of a common reality, of universal up and down, has rendered hyperbole almost impossible to detect and compass:

. . well-meaning friends have repeatedly cautioned me against it, for fear–baseless, no doubt–that my intentions will be misunderstood. The more I protest that my scheme is as clear as the night is long –the old New York lottery slogan “You gotta be in it, to win it” at last made universal; Rawls’s theoretical “veil of ignorance” finally put into practice–the more insistent and stern and dour these same friends become: “You’ll see, they will think you are trying to destroy their precious idea of the American family, the bedrock of society.” “You’ll see, they will accuse you of being a fascist, a Nazi.” . . Have we now come to the point, I wondered, that our shared sense of reality is so tenuous that something as outrageous to common sense as my big baby lottery will not immediately be recognized as political satire?

. . you are kidding, aren’t you?

. . Like Tina Fey mimicking Sarah Palin, what passes for satire today plays on our incredulity, presenting us with an exact replica of something real but at the same time so absurd that it beggars our belief. It gets a laugh, but what is missing is the wild, inspired, visionary flights of imagination that masters of satire like Jonathan Swift so excelled at. Through caustic hyperbole, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to raise Irish babies like cattle and sell them to Englishmen for dinner in order to eliminate overpopulation and poverty in Ireland made his first readers–and us, too, almost three centuries after them–see and feel how the world appears from the standpoint of common decency.

And, for me, that’s it. When there’s no “common decency”, satire becomes hopeless, doesn’t it? There’s no one beating heart to it, no bullseye to hit. Communication becomes a crapshoot, like trying to squint and see one of those fractal space shuttles behind the multi-colored chaos. Did you get it — can you see it?

And when one side of the political world, as a matter of policy, becomes so mechanically bent on taking an axe to the other, no matter what’s said or done, the fragments are all that’s universal. As in: “Bringing down deficits is the decent thing to do, but if you proffer a pay/go rule before we do, not one of us will vote for it . .”

Nobody writes like that any more and I could not help wondering if the extinction of satire that attempts to shame people into recognizing that there are things higher and worth striving towards than what merely happens to exist was a sign of just how poverty-stricken our moral, political, and literary imaginations have become.

And there is the point. She could have paid Barone to write his post, but he did it for free.

“We heard, in the hearing, one of the people that came to testify. And they said that this is not normal. And I had to think about it a while. Y’know, what were we talking about. And so, I started thinking. We’re talking about taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wiggling it around in excrement. And you have to think, I’m not sure, would I allow that to be done to me? All of us, that could happen to you. Would you let that happen to you? Is that normal? Is that something that we want to, um, portray as the same as the one flesh union between a man and a woman?”

So much ridiculousness. But it’s a comedy of typically political distasteful gambits and angles cobbled together, this one to sway the argument against same-sex marriage.

Why bother to even parse all this hate and stupidity? Because this is the way politics works. People don’t much like it, so they’re not very good at evaluating the give-and-take, and so bullcrap like this scores points. When you want your issues to win the day, at some point you’ve got to jump in the ring with people like Nancy Elliott. And if you’re going to do something so personally insulting, you might as well play to win, right? Right.

Which leaves us with the main strategy, which is as timelessly Republican as it gets: don’t bother with the issue.

Look at her whole statement, in all its shifting strategies and fearful, naked psychology — where are her arguments on same sex marriage?

“Is that something that we want to, um, portray as the same as the one flesh union between a man and a woman?”

That’s the only thing that might be deemed barely relevant to what this body is supposed to be discussing, and it’s relevant only in a mythic, or religious, sense.

Elliott, instead, chose to go on about others’ sex lives. And her bugger-a-boo has always been a common practice for married people. And she’s only targeting gay men — lesbians are okay for marriage, Nancy? She’s creating a lurid distraction from the issue.

Gays have always been around, they’ll always be around, they’ve always coupled, and they love each other as fiercely as straights do. No use in getting sidetracked into Elliott’s farcical tangents, they aren’t relevant.

Should we sanctify gay marriage “as the same as the one flesh union between a man and a woman”, as Nancy asks? Yes, game over.

“We heard, in the hearing, one of the people that came to testify. And they said that this is not normal. And I had to think about it a while. Y’know, what were we talking about. And so, I started thinking. We’re talking about taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wiggling it around in excrement. And you have to think, I’m not sure, would I allow that to be done to me? All of us, that could happen to you. Would you let that happen to you? Is that normal? Is that something that we want to, um, portray as the same as the one flesh union between a man and a woman?”

Republicans do know how to tap anger, and disgust. They go through life with all 11 fingers on the “WHAT THE . .?” button. And after all the ‘gay = sick + insane’ lobbying in the first half of the quote, New Hampshire legislator Nancy Elliott goes for the kill.

She personifies the ‘controversy’ by attempting to put herself, or, more obviously you, in the position of the lascivious freaks.

. . I’m not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?

Wha — sodomy? WHAT THE . . ?

All of us, that could happen to you. Would you let that happen to you?

Given Elliott’s angle on the issues, you can imagine the license plates:

New Hampshire: “LET PENISES WIGGLE IN EXCREMENT”

“We heard, in the hearing, one of the people that came to testify. And they said that this is not normal. And I had to think about it a while. Y’know, what were we talking about. And so, I started thinking. We’re talking about taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wiggling it around in excrement. And you have to think, I’m not sure, would I allow that to be done to me? All of us, that could happen to you. Would you let that happen to you? Is that normal? Is that something that we want to, um, portray as the same as the one flesh union between a man and a woman?”

The video making the internet rounds, New Hampshire lawmaker Nancy Elliott. When you break it down, it’s a whole slew of stupid and bigoted that Elliott manages in only a few seconds.

But there’s also a bit of genius here, I think. And that’s all the different psychological strategies employed in her little diatribe.

1.) ‘We have experts.’ Somebody testified.
2.) ‘I’m a reasonable person . .’ It really got me thinkin’, y’know?
3.) ‘. . but this stuff is weird.’ Keyword: “normal.”
4.) Distaste through association. “rectum” and “excrement.”
5.) Distaste through planting an image. ” . . wiggling it around in excrement.”
6.) This stuff is extreme, maybe criminal. Would you “allow” it?

After that comes the big gambit: it gets personal.

Came across this at StarkReports:

This is difficult to write. My grandfather suffered through dementia for the last 15 years of his life. It’s never easy to talk about, and in politics, it’s particularly difficult because of all the potential for cheap-shot concern-trolling…

But there’s a dirty little secret everyone is keeping in Pennsylvania and Washington. It isn’t difficult to puzzle it out for yourself; in fact, given the circumstances, it’s probably difficult to avoid developing nagging suspicions. But there are a lot of stories being told off the record and in hushed whispers. Tonight, I’ve decided to stop whispering and come forward with my own.

Mike is talking about Arlen Specter.

. . In the basement of the Russell Senate office building, there is a subway that ferries Senators and staff to and from the Capitol. Senator Spector was making his way over to the Capitol to cast a vote when I caught up with him and asked if he had decided to support or oppose the Bernanke nomination. He said he hadn’t decided. I asked him if he knew that Bernanke had said he was less concerned about unemployment than inflation. Specter answered gruffly that he was still making up his mind. Then he walked over to a call-button for the subway and pressed it several times.

The subway was already in the station.

It’s not like you can hide a subway.

The guard behind us yelled to the Senator, “Senator, he’s right there!” The driver of the subway yelled to the Senator, “Senator, I’m right here!” Specter continued to press the button for another coupla seconds before suddenly realizing the subway was already in the station and boarding.

A week ago, Specter inexplicably wandered up onto a ’stage’ that his opponent was currently addressing a crowd from:

Arlen Specter’s Kanye West Moment

After refusing to debate his opponent and insisting on strict rules for tonight’s Senate forum with Joe Sestak Sen. Arlen Specter stormed the stage while the Congressman was speaking and seemingly tried to confront and/or intimidate him while he was speaking at the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit…

Obviously standing just off the ballroom listening not only to the questions but to Joe Sestak’s responses he cheated on the format. Then for some very strange reason he bounded for the stage and mounted it. Was he having a senior moment, was he trying to throw Sestak off his game on live TV or was he deliberately trying to sabotage what was a finely organized event?

Saturday, after winning the Pennsylvania State Democratic committee endorsement, he couldn’t recall the name of a Pennsylvania Senator he wanted to call out:

LANCASTER, Pa. — Even as he accepted the resounding backing of the Pennsylvania Democratic state committee here Saturday, party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter’s vulnerability was on vivid display as he botched the name of a key Democratic officeholder in his acceptance speech.

“I’ll be fighting hard for the entire Democratic ticket. Sen. Andy — Andy —” Specter said, before pausing briefly, squinting his eyes.

“From Chester County,” he continued, losing his train of thought after clinching an emphatic 229-72 Senate endorsement vote from party regulars just minutes earlier.

“Dinniman,” the crowd responded almost in unison, referring to the state senator who represents West Chester. One committee member seated in the audience dropped his head and shook it.

Your United States Government is a football, and Republican Richard Shelby is taking it home. Right after he wrestles it away from all the other right-wing brats. Ahhh, such is public service.

Alabama Senator Shelby levied an across-the-board hold on all of the President’s appointments to the executive branch. Open positions in the government will languish until Shelby gets what he wants, which presumably includes hoppers full of black hair gel.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening.

Why? The liberal commie government that’s spending the hard-earned taxpayers’ money at a homicidal rate is ignoring Alabama projects:

The two programs Shelby wants to move forward or else:

- A $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers. From CongressDaily: “Northrop/EADS team would build the planes in Mobile, Ala., but has threatened to pull out of the competition unless the Air Force makes changes to a draft request for proposals.” Federal Times offers more details on the tanker deal, and also confirms its connection to the hold.

- An improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. From CongressDaily: “[Shelby] is frustrated that the Obama administration won’t build” the center, which Shelby earmarked $45 million for in 2008. The center is due to be based “at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.”

How big a power-play is this?

While individual holds are not unusual, Gary Jacobson, a congressional expert at the University of California at San Diego, said he knew of no previous use of a blanket hold.

The Senate is always full of assholes, and yet it’s never been done before. Meanwhile, in a related note, the furious tea partiers opened their convention today. And the Republican leadership are there to signal that they will do the teabaggers will:

Tea party convention seeks to put power in motion

…”There’s a clear economic message that’s evolving out of this movement,” Republican strategist David Winston said. “Which direction, in terms of the political activism, does this go? I think we’ll get a sense of that from this convention.”

GOP officials are watching closely, though not participating publicly.

“The Republican Party has always been a grass-roots party, and we respect the healthy debate that is going on in the states,” said Republican National Committee spokesman LeRoy Coleman. “Republican principles of lower taxes, smaller government and less spending match those of tea party supporters and we will continue to work to make sure that tea party supporters recognize our candidates most closely match what they look for in elected officials.”

They say they despise the workings of big government, but they’re lying. They only hate it when it works for you.

President Obama has made the rounds, spectacularly. But the politics are probably over, for the time, for the towering talent that leads the Democrats by word alone. Such are Roman Senators .

Al Franken lays into David Axelrod over health care bill
By ANDY BARR & MANU RAJU | 2/4/10 7:47 PM EST

Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.

Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact…

In his public session with the senators Wednesday, Obama urged them to “finish the job” on health care but did not lay out a path for doing so. That uncertainty appeared to trigger Franken’s anger, and the sources in the room said he laid out his concerns much more directly than any senator did in the earlier public session.

The private session was set up in a panel format, with Axelrod joined at the front of the room by Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine and Democratic strategist Paul Begala.

ADD: He did it again, today — attacking the CEO of Comcast for lying to his face:

Minnesota, you should be proud, the guy’s a damn good Senator.

Well, now you know another thing Governor Moosemeat will grandstand over at the Tea Party Convention:

I would ask the president to show decency in this process by eliminating one member of that inner circle, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, and not allow Rahm’s continued indecent tactics to cloud efforts. Yes, Rahm is known for his caustic, crude references about those with whom he disagrees, but his recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.

The Obama Administration’s Chief of Staff scolded participants, calling them, “F—ing retarded,” according to several participants, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

She’s not shy about brandishing her youngest, Down Syndrome afflicted child, is she?

RAHM ISSUED APOLOGY — BUT NOT TO DEMOCRATS

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel called the head of the Special Olympics last week to apologize for using the expression “fucking retarded,” Politico’s Ben Smith reports.

“Rahm called Tim Shriver Wednesday to apologize and the apology was accepted,” an unnamed White House official said.

Shameful.

Sarah Palin, who called for Emanuel to apologize for using the word “retarded,” was herself accused of using the word last year. Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin’s daughter, told the media last fall that Palin described Trig, her son with Down Syndrome, as her “retarded baby.” Palin strongly denied ever using the expression.