Quote of the Day

"Governor Romney is a tremendous improvement. I think we could have been even more of an improvement, but that's, you know, that's, that, that, that, that issue was passed. Uh, Governor Romney is an important and dramatic improvement, and that's why we're behind him."

-- Rick Santorum, endorsing Mitt Rommey, sort of

Cesca's been keeping track, in pretty hilarious fashion, of the ways in which "Romney Fever" is sweeping across the nation -- cataloging instance after pulse-pounding instance of Romney receiving effusive, full-throated support from Republicans.

Add this one to the mix.

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"He's like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He just knows how to stay alive. He's running through the jungle, fighting back, shooting from the hip, takes a lot of hits, stays angry the entire time, and he is giving a voice to a lot of people out there whose lives have been completely upended."

-- Tom Brokaw on Rick Santorum, during MSNBC's coverage of the Republican primaries last night

Where to even being. It's this kind of nonsense that frustrates the hell out of anyone looking for intelligent, responsible political reportage and analysis on cable news. No, Tom, Santorum isn't like a character in a movie, nor is he a horse in a race; he's very real and his rhetoric and proposed policies have the potential to impact the entire country. And the people he's largely giving a voice to -- the ones whose lives have been "upended," mostly by the frightening march of progress -- are those who believe that we need to return to the 19th century when it comes to our politics and pervading beliefs on subjects like religion and women's rights. He says the separation of church and state makes him sick, that a college education is for snobs and those willing to be indoctrinated by liberal thinking, and that Satan, the father of lies, is behind this country's troubles. But instead of parsing the policies and views of a man running for President of the United States and the way they could affect each and every one of us, Brokaw can only sit back and marvel at Santorum's supposedly ferocious tenacity.

This is why no one with a mildly functional brain gives a shit about anything the TV news networks have to say about politics anymore.

Yeah, Tom -- Santorum is like a character in a Bruce Willis movie. He's Brad Pitt's delusional mental patient Jeffrey Goines from 12 Monkeys. And if you don't have the balls to at least notice that because you're too busy clinging to some horseshit illusion of objectivity, then no one should be listening to you.

Quotes of the Day

"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob."

"Not all folks are gifted the same way. Some people have incredible gifts with their hands. There are good, decent men and women who work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor... That’s why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

"I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely. The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country."

"We have some real problems at our college campuses with political correctness, with an ideology that is forced upon people who, you know, who may not agree with the politically correct left doctrine. And one of the things that I’ve spoken out on and will continue to speak out is to make sure that conservative and more mainstream, common-sense conservative and principles that have made this country great are reflected in our college courses and with college professors. And at many, many, and I would argue most institutions in this country, that simply isn’t the case."

"62% of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it."

All of this was said by Rick Santorum over a weekend which saw the Republican party's highest-profile lunatic zealot -- at least currently -- going off the rails in a way he never has before (and that's really saying something). Never mind the ongoing -- though possibly most blatant yet -- demonization of intellectualism. Never mind how irresponsible that kind of rhetoric is at a time when the rest of the world is, as the Washington Post points out, "churning out engineers and scientists at a faster and faster rate." Never mind that Santorum's statistics on faith and a college education were apparently pulled out of his ass, as was another reference he made this weekend to a speech on religion and politics, supposedly from JFK, that never actually happened. Also never mind the overall admission that once a person becomes intellectually enlightened, he or she generally abandons ridiculous religious superstition and ass-backward conservative politics -- that a keen and educated mind is naturally antithetical to a right-wing viewpoint.

No, what's important is what all of this kind of public saber-rattling adds up to and underscores. It expresses the sheer terror coming from the right these days that, as I've said quite a bit recently here and on the podcast, its current political model is dying. What we're witnessing are the ugly death spasms of the incarnation of conservatism that's existed for decades.

Lo and behold, Jonathan Chait spells it out almost exactly as Bob and I have -- albeit more eloquently -- in a new piece for New York Magazine:

"The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that 'freedom' is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency...

Today, cosmopolitan liberals may still feel like an embattled sect—they certainly describe their political fights in those terms—but time has transformed their rump minority into a collective majority. As conservative strategists will tell you, there are now more of 'them' than 'us.' What’s more, the disparity will continue to grow indefinitely. Obama actually lost the over-45-year-old vote in 2008, gaining his entire victory margin from younger voters—more racially diverse, better educated, less religious, and more socially and economically liberal. Portents of this future were surely rendered all the more vivid by the startling reality that the man presiding over the new majority just happened to be, himself, young, urban, hip, and black. When jubilant supporters of Obama gathered in Grant Park on Election Night in 2008, Republicans saw a glimpse of their own political mortality. And a galvanizing picture of just what their new rulers would look like."

Santorum's insane rants are exactly what they sound like: a desperate call to arms for a fading way of thinking. In one weekend, he summed up perfectly what the Republicans have been about for years -- and displayed in unequivocal terms why their time is up.

Their audience is simply disappearing.

Picture of the Day

Take a close look. That would be a portrait of Rick Santorum made entirely out of gay porn.

Click to engorge.

Goodbye, Purgatory

Somebody tweeted a link to this recent story yesterday afternoon along with the question, "Has the Catholic Church lost its mind?"

NBC 4 Washington: Girl Scout Troops Banned from Virginia Church/1.23.12

The answer to that is, of course, yes and no. Yes it's lost its mind, but no, not recently or anything -- because it never really had one to begin with, a fact which has been proven again and again over hundreds of years. We're lucky the church no longer has the imperial authority to wage actual blood-and-guts wars in the name of converting heretics to its way of "thinking," but it's still doing plenty of damage just by lobbing archaic edicts from the Vatican like psycho-bombs all across the globe. The Catholic power structure says birth control is verboten because the almighty creator of the universe says so and, surprise, hundreds of thousands -- possibly millions -- of unnecessary deaths and AIDS orphans in the Third World becomes a reality.

The only thing interesting about one Catholic church and school's audacious decision to target a bunch of Girl Scouts over the group's supposed link to Planned Parenthood -- and indeed the church's recent inserting of itself squarely into the ridiculous political fight over contraception -- is what it says about the entire organization's view of itself these days. Consider it a kind of subtle State of the Church address, and if you're listening closely you can hear exactly how the Catholic hierarchy, particularly in the United States, feels like its done its time and, in its own parlance, paid its penance after a metric ton of devastating press and lawsuit after lawsuit in the wake of the priest sex scandal -- and now it's ready to reassert itself as the moral authority that it is. That old Catholic swagger has returned in spades. The pride is back, baby.

The problem? The church may have conveniently forgiven itself -- what with being in the forgiveness business after all, especially when it comes to its own sins -- but most Americans haven't forgiven it, nor have they forgotten. Rick Santorum may be a beaver-shit crazy Catholic hardliner, one who hates birth control and who thinks Satan is making a play for the heart and soul of the United States, but he's part of a dwindling statistic: people who give a damn what the Catholic Church has to say about anything. Anything at all.

Freudian Slip of the Day

Rick Santorum spokesperson Alice Stewart attempts to clarify what her boss meant when he questioned President Obama's "theology" and said that it wasn't Bible-based.

Suffice it to say, she cleared it up nicely -- probably better than she wanted to.

Quote of the Day

"I've repeatedly said I don't question the president's faith. I've repeatedly said that I believe the president's Christian -- he says he's Christian. But I am talking about his worldview, the way he addresses problems in this country, and they're different than most people view it in America."

-- Rick Santorum on CBS's Face the Nation this morning

That follows this little gem spouted off to, of course, a Tea Party rally in Ohio yesterday:

"It's not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology."

Now take a look at the clock on your computer screen, or on your phone, or grab a calendar and remind yourself what the date is. What the year is. Force yourself to confront the fact that in the year 2012 a supposedly rational human being -- a man running for the highest office in the United States and not a fucking mental patient strapped to a bed in a padded room -- is taking his directives from a 2,000-year-old magic book and criticizing the man currently holding the highest office in the United States for supposedly not doing the same.

Sure, there are other countries where this much deference is given to superstitious nonsense by government and governmental leaders. You know what we generally call those countries? The Third World. Or the Middle East. Ironically, the areas Santorum and the rest of the right try to subtly and not-so-subtly paint Barack Obama as being from and beholden to.

Just four months ago I mentioned how this was coming -- yet again.

"Faith No More" (Originally Published 10.11.11)

I'll try to make this quick, since as I said I'm kind of pressed for time right now.

Chances are by now you're aware of the fallout from last week's Values Voters Summit, the annual event in which the hard-right Evangelical nutjob segment of the electorate gathers to throw King James Bibles at the feet of Republican leaders to see who will be the last one standing after beating his or her competition to death with one. This year, everybody seemed to be gunning for one guy: Mitt Romney. Poor Mitt got it hard from both ends, so to speak, as his place on the speaking roster happened -- through what I'm sure was complete coincidence -- to fall between Dallas megachurch demagogue Pastor Robert Jeffress and psychopathic talk radio host Bryan Fischer, both of whom have railed against Romney's Mormon faith as an insult to the one, true God.

Jeffress, who astonishingly is the cuddlier of the two, merely referred to Mormonism as a cult while lavishing praise on Rick Perry for supposedly being a trustworthy follower of Jesus Christ; Fischer took it three or four giant steps further, saying not only that a proven Christian and a proven Christian alone should be our next president, but that Sharia law is coming to take over our courts, homosexuals are a threat to the public health and the reason we haven't seen a successful attack on the contiguous 48 since 9/11 is that crowds sing "God Bless America" during the seventh inning stretch at major league baseball games. And no, I'm not making that last one up.

Romney, to his credit, tried to take the high road in his reaction to all the hyper-pious pummeling. Of course at something like the Values Voters Summit, the high road doesn't need to be very high; the Lincoln Tunnel towers over the discourse at this thing.

So is Mormonism a cult? Was it, for the most part, the brainchild of con-men and has it been perpetuated by the power-hungry and adhered to by the weak and desperate? Is it a lunatic belief system that should have no place influencing American politics? Yes on all counts. But here's the thing: That makes it no different than any other faith-based religion.

Fischer and Jeffress have always been despicably hateful fuckers whose opinions needed to be pushed so far to the fringes that they practically vanish into the ether. But at this point more than any other in our recent history, this country does not have the luxury to concern itself with with ridiculous contrivances like which ancient superstition a candidate aligns him or herself with -- whether he or she passes some religious purity test by properly genuflecting before the right god.

Over the next few months, as the campaign ramps up, you're going to start hearing a lot more proclamations of faith from those running for the highest office in the world. They'll talk about how their belief in Jesus or whatever-the-hell guides them, and what's more, they'll do it largely as a theatrical act of indulgence, as a means of cynically pandering to those they feel they need to pander to in order to get elected. Their command performance may not always be at the whim of blatant sociopaths like Jeffress and Fischer, but it will certainly be as a show of respect to the supposedly benign faith of which these men have become extremist purveyors and arbiters. And that faith, while something I disagree with wholeheartedly as a rational human being, should at the very least be a personal choice and a personal choice only -- it should be something that at all times is excluded from American politics.

At this fragile point in our nation's history, the fact that our presidential candidates will feel that they have the latitude, even for a moment, to gush metaphysical politics-as-usual platitudes is simply terrifying. Discussing something as abstract and ineffectual as faith at this moment is akin to extolling one's own favorite lottery numbers. Neither offers a concrete method of action. Faith will never defend this country's people from the ongoing threats to their livelihood. God won't save us from the mess we're currently in.

We need something more than wishful thinking, and we don't have the time to talk about anything less.

Adding: Matt Osborne digs up and expounds on a Santorum speech from four years ago in which God's Favorite Candidate® enlightens us to the real threat facing the United States of America during this tumultuous period in our history. You guessed it: Satan. Again, please keep in mind that someone who believes that a fallen angel, a creature now residing in hell and responsible for all the bad in the universe, is at war with a heavenly creator and is now seeking to control the destiny of our country -- this guy is considered completely sane. Not only sane, he's the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. People who believe nonsense like this are usually put on Thorazine drips.

Everything Is Under Control

Since we have such a large crossover audience these days I generally go out of my way not to run too much of the same material Cesca does, but every once in a while it's unavoidable -- like now. I haven't really delved too deeply into the whole obscenely stupid contraception controversy the Republicans have inexplicably forced within the past couple of weeks precisely for the reason that it is so obscenely stupid; it's political nitro glycerine and it's going to blow up in their faces in such a huge way that it may single-handedly be a quantum leap in the devolution of the GOP as it presently exists. The demographics of the country are changing and what we're witnessing now from the right is a desperate and panicked attempt to cling to the power that a dwindling group of white, Christian men believe they're entitled to and were bequeathed by the all-powerful Founding Fathers -- while the fact remains that that power is slipping away and will only continue to.

What's interesting, though, is that even with the lunatic fringe grabbing hold of the Republican party with both hands, it's rare that the opportunistic power structure within the GOP picks a fight that tips its hand so completely that it becomes obvious to everyone just how radical the backward-ass thinking of the modern conservative movement is. Raising holy hell over whether women should have access to co-pay-free birth control is exactly that kind of issue. It's a third rail they're going to absolutely regret getting anywhere near because it's forcing them to openly cop to being the dictatorial Neanderthals they are when it comes to their feelings about what rights women should and shouldn't have.

Case in point, this doozy of a quote from Rick Santorum Super PAC financier Foster Friess, offered up during an interview with Andrea Mitchell:

"This contraception thing, my gosh, it’s (so) inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly."

I'll give you a minute to read that again if you'd like -- also to pick your jaw up off the floor. Crazy old white guy Friess, rather than being the exception when it comes to this type of thinking, is actually pretty much on par with the rest of the Republican mindset at the moment. Over the past couple of days, this basic sentiment has been echoed by slut-shaming dogmatic blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Darrell Issa and of course Rick Santorum. These patriarchal assholes believe that birth control isn't a necessity because, well, women shouldn't be having sex anyway unless they're married, planning to have kids, or are spreading it for Newt Gingrich -- and in an irony so staggering that it almost causes your brain to short-circuit, these champions of small government are willing to officially legislate the most personal decisions a woman makes: how she chooses to have sex, for what reason, and the outcome she hopes to achieve from it. It's hardly even necessary to say that this kind of horseshit explains why the right is always idealizing and romanticizing the by-gone era of the 1950s -- that sweet spot in our cultural history when white guys still walked the land as imperious titans and "gals" did what the hell they were told.

Again, Cesca's put together a really great piece about this subject for the Huffington Post and it's something I'd suggest everyone take a look at. I always picture the current Republican demagogues to be living incarnations of Big Bob, the J.T. Walsh character who was the mayor of Pleasantville in the movie of the same name. This ridiculous fight over birth control, with a bunch of XY-chromo'd self-appointed father figures dictating what's best for America's women, does nothing to discourage that analogy.

Tweet(s) of the Day

New York Daily News: Megadeth's Dave Mustaine Backs Santorum/2.15.12

"I'm Crazy and I'm Right"

This just in.

Quote of the Day

"Folks, the Republican Party has been in a mad rush to its extreme white wing, and Rick Santorum has been there waiting the whole time."

-- Al Sharpton on MSNBC

A lot of hay is already being made of this comment, with people asking whether he actually meant to say "white" or if it was simply a gaffe. And by people I mean the three households nationwide who watch Al Sharpton's show and the internet media who make money and score page views by blowing up any dumb thing anyone says on television into an earth-shattering controversy.

Did Sharpton really mean to say "white wing?" Well, on the one hand he's conditioned himself to see blatant racism everywhere he looks, so it wouldn't be a surprise if he naturally ran his views on Santorum through that prism -- nor would it be a shock if the racism center of his brain simply misfired, Tourettes-like, because it had been a while since he'd said anything racially incendiary or just plain blamed whitey for something. On the other hand, I don't get the idea that Sharpton's mind is stratified enough to be capable of dynamic repression, so I'm not sure a Freudian Slip is even possible. Chances are he just fucked up the word "right" because he's a buffoon who can't go two minutes without tripping over his own tongue.

Fighting Words

For a couple of weeks now on the podcast, Bob and I have discussed the fact that while everyone's busy pointing out Rick Perry's inability to speak without tripping over his own stupid tongue, no one's paying attention to how asinine and dangerous the things he's trying to say are. Like a couple of weeks ago, when he couldn't remember that he wanted to shutter the Department of Energy, which controls the country's nuclear weapons -- or this gem from Saturday, where he seems to be saying that he wants to end civilian control of our military:

"There is a time and a place for us to intervene, and intervene militarily. But when we intervene militarily, we best make the decision on how we are going to win and how we are going to win convincingly and quickly, send those young men and women with the equipment to win. Don’t let some congressman sitting in an air-conditioned office in Washington DC deciding what the rules of engagement are. … And for us to micromanage them, in a civilian way, without their commanders truly in charge, is absolutely irresponsible and as commander-in-chief of this country I will not let it happen."

I bring this up not because it's so outrageous, which it of course is, and not solely because it's indicative of how far a candidate like Perry has to go to get noticed at an event like the Christian Family Leader "values forum" when he's way down in the polls. No, I mention it because it's crap like this that makes it 100% clear how offensive it is when self-righteous clowns like Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher, etc. make the claim that the Obama Administration is essentially the same thing as any given Republican presidency would be these days, and when they threaten, as Greenwald has, that allowing one of these Perry-esque far-right malignancies into the White House would be a necessary sacrifice if it meant that it would finally bring the country around to how destructive the current GOP model of thinking is.

Right. Because Obama, although by no means someone willing to give the left everything it wants, is the same as a guy who wants to take the reins completely off the U.S. military, who wants to kill the Department of Energy, who thinks the Occupy Wall Street protesters are dirty hippies who are just looking for a handout and who need to go take a shower and get a job (as Gingrich so cleverly intoned on Saturday), who thinks God told him or her to run for office (as half the GOP hopefuls have enthused), who thinks homosexuality is some kind of social disease (Bachmann and Santorum), and who believes that individual towns should be able to ban mosques if they choose (Herman "Toucan Stubs" Cain).

These people are fucking crazy and dangerous. And refusing to accept that because you're all in a huff that the current president simply isn't liberal enough for you is just as crazy and just as dangerous.

Quote of the Day

"We have to move forward with conforming with what was happening in the past."

-- Rick Santorum at last night's Republican debate on Fox News

Chances are you've seen it by now, and if you haven't I promise you probably will several times throughout the day, but this statement was made while Santorum was answering a question submitted on YouTube by a U.S. soldier currently fighting in Iraq. The soldier wanted to know if any of the Republican candidates would work to circumvent the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell if elected president -- that's because the soldier happens to be gay.

The response of several members of the live audience at the debate to this question -- to a United States soldier who volunteered to put his life on the line in defense of this country?

They booed him. Loudly.

For those keeping score, so far at these GOP debates we've seen crowds of supposedly hyper-moral and unfalteringly patriotic conservatives applaud 234 executions, cheer for the death of the uninsured, and now verbally attack a U.S. soldier because he's gay and doesn't feel like pretending he isn't just to calm the nerves of those whose fragile sensibilities require them to go on believing that gay men and women don't exist.

And that's really what it's all about, the meaning behind the above quote: The conservative movement has always been terrified of change and progress -- like cavemen batting at raindrops, anything new that intrudes upon their limited view of the world and shatters the bubble they exist in either by choice or circumstance they lash out at angrily. I mentioned on the podcast this week that you should never be fooled when a GOP candidate or elected official tells you that he or she believes that America's best days are ahead of her. This is 100% bullshit. Now more than ever before, Republicanism means not simply an embrace of the past but a fetishistic lionization of it, and a cold-sweat-inducing fear of the future. These people cannot come to grips with the fact that the world and the country are changing: that a black man can become president, a gay man or woman can serve in the military with distinction, or that instant mass communication has helped to democratize the world and rendered the notion of imperial patriotism -- to say nothing of the global respect and admiration of America as a shining city on the hill -- somewhat obsolete and most certainly tired.

So many of them long to return to the comforts of a nostalgically idealized past -- when things weren't so damn confusing. Like Brooks getting out of prison after fifty years in The Shawshank Redemption, they're overwhelmed by how insane the world has become and they just want to go back inside their prison where it's nice and safe. Who gives a shit if there are bars on the windows -- turns out they keep the ugly world out as much as they keep you in.

So, yeah -- they booed a U.S. soldier. Because he's gay.

Think of that, read the above quite yet again, and it becomes crystal clear that all that stuff about looking toward the future is a bunch of crap. In the mind of the average conservative, America will never again have another day as good as yesterday.

Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"So the gay community said, 'He's comparing gay sex to incest and polygamy, how dare he do this,' and they have gone out on a, I would argue, jihad against Rick Santorum since then."

-- Rick Santorum, speaking in South Carolina last week

Let's see: He's melodramatic, bitchy, convinced that a bunch of men want to bring him down, and he refers to himself in the third-person. I don't know -- methinks the queer doth protest too much.

Still, I can't wait to see what a gay jihad looks like. Can you build a bomb out of amyl nitrate?