We have a new president elect…. His name is Donald J Trump. So move over Barack. Move over Hillary, Harry, Jill and all you namby-pamby pathetic losers still crying in your grande double shot skinny lattes...

There was a time in this country when we united behind the flag in celebration of America's new president, our new leader. We all did so in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected.

We had high hopes for a united country, irrespective of our politics.

And it’s time for the left, assuming they are capable, to show the same dignity and class to the 45th president-elect.

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DICK ARMEY (V.O.)

Bartonville.  Shit.  I'm still only in Bartonville.
Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back at FreedomWorks.
I'm here four years now... waiting for a mission... getting softer...

Before then, the best hope for the republic is for every one of these people (and media parasites who enable them) to be metaphorically stripped bare and driven into the sea while their grip on power is still weak and uncertain.

So get on that.

And before you rebuke me for violating the First Jinxing Rule of Electoral Politics, rest assured that just after I wrote "the incoming Clinton Administration" I went outside, turned around three times and spit and cursed.

Because at this stage only a great fool would risk tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.

The Post's View

Softening on Trump? Remember this.

DO YOU remember when Donald Trump crudely mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter, and then lied about having done so?

No? That’s just as the Republican candidate might hope. Now that he is nearing the Republican nomination, he says he will become more “presidential.” After winning the New York primary, he referred to “Senator Cruz” instead of “Lyin’ Ted.” You can expect multitudes of office-seekers and sycophants to follow Chris Christie’s craven path to believing, or pretending to believe, in a presidential Trump.

So it is important to remember.

Remember that Mr. Trump said that Mexicans...

Remember that Mr. Trump falsely claimed that thousands of American Muslims...

Remember that Mr. Trump insulted....

Remember that Mr. Trump lashed out..

Remember how Mr. Trump threatened...

Remember that Mr. Trump threatened and disparaged...

Remember that Mr. Trump vowed to ban...

Remember that Mr. Trump promised to round up...

Remember that he cited “Operation Wetback”...

Remember that Mr. Trump, unlike virtually every scientist in the world...

“Winning is the antidote to a lot of things,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said a earlier this year. As Mr. Trump marches toward 1,237 delegates, others will emulate that amoral embrace.

So remember. Winning is not an antidote to bigotry, violence, ignorance, insults and lies.

Remember how Republicans celebrated the Memorial Day weekend a decade ago by lining up behind George W. Bush's attempt to use the "political capital" he had collected in the 2004 election as kindling to set fire to the Social Security system?

From the late Steven Gilliard:

The Social Security doom train

Stealing social security

GOP Lawmakers Acknowledge Uphill Fight on Social Security

Backers of Bush Plan Cite Public Awareness of System's Woes

By Jonathan Weisman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 30, 2005; Page A04

President Bush's congressional allies on Social Security are limping into the week-long Memorial Day recess, battered by public opinion polls yet hopeful that a rising awareness of Social Security's long-run financing problems will propel a legislative solution.

But with just 49 legislative days left before Congress's planned adjournment, the odds are still against Bush securing the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, Republican lawmakers concede.

"I don't know if we can get it done this year," said Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee. "I don't think you could get a third of the Congress to vote for any one plan at this point."

"They've made slight progress," said Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), a moderate, "maybe 'slight' being the key word."

Social Security was supposed to be the focal point of the Bush domestic agenda this year, but passage of a plan to secure its long-term financing and add private investment accounts has grown more complicated in recent weeks as Republicans appear increasingly willing to challenge the White House on issues including expanded stem cell research and the reimportation of prescription drugs.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Washington is exactly where Bush strategists thought it would be right now on Social Security, with a rising awareness of the system's problems and Congress entering a summertime legislative push.

Duffy pointed to poll numbers showing an increasing percentage of the population identifying Social Security's finances as a growing problem. But those same polls show the public strongly against Bush's proposals and highly critical of his handling of the issue. If anything, public opposition appears to be hardening. The senior lobby AARP has gained nearly 400,000 members -- 20 percent more than it expected -- since the beginning of the year, when it launched its campaign to sink the Bush plan, said AARP spokeswoman Christine M. Donohoo.

When Congress returns next Monday, the fate of Social Security restructuring will be in the hands of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, not the White House. Moderate Republicans are convinced that Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) will stitch together a large package of savings incentives, private pension changes and tax breaks for long-term health care that will be popular enough to win majority support for more controversial benefit cuts that will secure Social Security's financial future. If necessary, they say, Thomas will jettison the central plank of Bush's plan, private investment accounts financed out of the existing payroll tax.

Thomas's package could put intolerable pressure on Democrats to break with their leadership and come to the negotiating table, said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), another committee member. Already, Teamsters President James P. Hoffa has suggested that organized labor should not stand in the way of dialogue on Social Security changes, and two Democrats -- Reps. Robert Wexler (Fla.) and James P. Moran Jr. (Va.) -- unveiled their own Social Security plan last month. "I just want to issue a clarion call to Democrats: Get ready, because Bill Thomas will ultimately deliver a product that most mainstreamers in the U.S.A. will find compelling," Foley said.

Why? There is no deal Bush can accept which will past muster with the Dems. Notice the contradiction: public opposition is hardening, while the Dems will face "intolerable" pressure to break with their leadership.

Really? Where is this pressure going to come from? I mean, I wouldn't take Mark Foley all that seriously. He still denies having a boyfriend.

They are planning to cut benefits.This is going to scare old people shitless. Why would the Dems feel the need to go along with a benefits cut? Moran and Wexler got their wrists slapped and ignored. The GOP has no good way to sell benefit cuts.

Here's the deal: Bill Thomas is going to propose cutting social security benefits. Once that becomes the issue, the GOP should plan on losing the House. Because once you dump private investment, you just have benefit cuts. Who the hell is going to support benefit cuts? You can gussie it up any way you choose, but it's a benefits cut.

The best thing in the world is to be able to ride this issue into the 2006 election cycle. Because even in red diistricts, you will be able to elect people to save social security. Instead of realizing this is a failed plan, they want to ride it to defeat. I say spur them on.

And why exactly did we hafta get rid of Social Security immediately?

Because after just four years in the hands of the Bush Crime Family, the budget surpluses which Bill Clinton had left behind had been magically transformed into deficits as far as the eye could see.

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

Yes, There Is a New Economy

Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable

MAR 19, 2001

...

This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can afford to return $ 1.6 trillion to the taxpayers and still have money left over for Social Security, Medicare, and an $ 800 billion contingency fund. The Democrats cry that projections are notoriously inaccurate, that the tax cuts will blow a hole in the budget, and that the Bush administration's risky scheme (which sailed through the House last week) would cast us back into the days of piling debt.

...

...even if today's productivity improvements are only on the scale of, say, the improvements our economy saw after World War II, we may be in for a long and sunny ride. There is a rough historical pattern here. A new technology is invented. It takes a long time before people figure out how to use it. The electric motor was invented in the 1880s, but it didn't transform factories until the 1920s, economist Paul David has noted. Once the technology is fully deployed, however, there are decades of positive results. Daniel Sichel of the Federal Reserve points to previous technology-driven surges that lasted 10 and 25 years. That suggests we may still be near the beginning of this particular period of bounty.

If we are, an occasional period of slower growth or even a recession may occur, but the U.S. economy is fundamentally strong, and both laymen and legislators have good reasons to believe it will remain strong for many years. Industrial productivity is surging. Americans are not only the hardest working people on earth (the average American works about 10 weeks a year more than the average European) but also the most productive workers -- by far. If you measure value added per hour worked, Americans do about 20 percent better than Germans and the French, and 40 percent better than the Japanese.

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

In case you were worried that Dinesh DeSouza's fairy tales of Barack Obama's father's ghost appearing like Hamlet's dad and leading him into a Sekrit Marxist Muslim Plot to turn Murrica into a Leninist Sharia Workers Caliphate might be disappearing into the back of the wingnut closet where they* keep their Haig '88


campaign buttons and autographed copies of "GEORGE WALLACE FOR THE BIG JOB" segregationist comic book, don't be.

D'iscredited Defrauder is still on the job, asking such important questions like...

Is Barack Obama the Intellectual Heir of Bill Ayers ?

And the answer is...no.

Surprise!  (I had to swap out this screen shot for the actual video, b/c the damn thing would not stop auto-starting):


See, as D'iminish Desuckers carefully explains to the sock puppet who is "interviewing" him, Barry O is actually more radical than his Communist Cell Leader, Bill Ayers.

"Bill Ayers does not want the federal government to have a dossier on you so that if they decide you're a critic, they can send guys with guns to your door.  Bill Ayers does not want that.  But Obama does."

Hell, he's even more dangerous than...

...Jimmy Carter!

Because Jimmy Carter was just a fuck-up who handed Iran over to Khomeini because he was stupid. Whereas  Obama was "thrilled" to his pals in the  and the Muslim Brotherhood come to power in Egypt.

"So you get the idea here that Obama is acting consistently to undermine our allies and, in a sense, allow our enemies to consolidate power.”

To people who are not Fox News zombies, this sounds like random, paranoid gibberish echoing though the air conditioning ducts of a mental institution.

To people who are Fox News zombies, this random, paranoid gibberish not only makes perfect sense, it is the well-thumbed hymnal from which they sing their little hearts out every day.  To them, there is no scintilla of doubt that Barack Obama is the personification of pure Liberal evil and in personal command of sinister terrorist forces around the world.  This is because, after expending decades of effort and billion of dollars, Conservatives have bred for themselves a 100% fact-resistant chump army.

The hard work of building their Uruk-hai is over.  At this point all Conservatives have to do is maintenance, which means:

• Making sure every single thing President Obama does is immediately retrofitted into pre-existing narrative of secret Commie cells and vast, globe-spanning, multi-generational plots destroy Murrica, which have all culminated with the presidency of Barack Obama.  And don't worry one little bit about what to do with yesterday's steaming pile of Roger Ailes-brand treason that directly contradicts today's batch of lies! The Pig People long ago completely internalized Conservatism's real secret weapon -- Strategic Forgettery -- so that will not be a problem:

Fox News questions 'convenient' timing of Benghazi suspect's capture

A Fox News panel on Tuesday mused about the alleged "political motivations" behind the Obama administration's "convenient" capture last weekend of a key suspect in the Benghazi embassy attack.

"I think this thing needs to be tied in a bow for certain individuals to have a clean break," panelist Pete Hegseth said, adding that it was "all too neat, and it's too cute."...

• And then pointing their flying monkeys in the right direction (h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars):

South Dakota Republican Party Passes Resolution Calling For Obama's Impeachment

*Thanks for the catch

Now that the Neocons have once again risen from their graves to use their magic powers to wipe out our Elite Media's memory of anything that happened before January 20, 2009, it seemed a sadly appropriate time to republish a nibble from this post of mine from that mysterious Land Before History:

...
[Conservative leadership] -- liked the press that conspires with them -- speak out feebly or not at all on the ongoing scandals of NOLA…and Iraq…and Abu Ghraib…and torture as policy…and secret prisons…and purloined elections…and habeas corpus being walled up and left to die like Fortunato.

And the many treasons of Karl Rove.

And the destruction of the CIA’s WMD intel infrastructure out of Cheney pique.

And their base’s Rapture-based molestation of genuine Christian values.

Their antediluvian superstitions that supercede any notion of science.

And the many treasons of Karl Rove.

Their pathological need to lie – badly -- about every single fucking thing.

And millions of missing emails.

And the many, many treasons of Karl Rove.

And so many more, all notable for the fact that no one in the MSM and no on in the Republican party dares to even whisper their simple common element: That they are all the fault of George W. Bush.

That their Dear Leader and his Regent are lying, criminal freaks who have led them all to disaster after disaster.

These GOP regime-dead-enders are weak and stupid and rotten to the bone. One or two hard, righteous punches and they would go down like a sack of wet switchgrass.

One or two of the kind of punches that the MSM used to casually rain on Bill Clinton day after day after day...

And yet the MSM continues to prop up the rotting carcass of the GOP like the corpse in ”Weekend at Bernie's”, and waltz it lovingly across the national stage year after year after year, protecting it as ferociously as they would their own children even as it goes raving mad, putrefies and crumbles to reek and maggots in their arms.

Is it that meme-nto disease? That inability to form any new political memories after 1997? Or is it something darker?

Whatever the reason, the story behind it would certainly be gripping, epic, infuriating and a great and lasting service to the cause of Democracy.

Too bad we no longer have a press capable of telling it.

Across the internet you will find people expressing their bleak indignation over what is happening to the memory of the Tienanmen Square in China.  Andrew Sullivan has rounded up a bunch of them.  This one is typical:

Lily Kuo remarks on how successfully the Chinese government has erased the events of June 4, 1989 from the collective memory:

[C]ontrary to what some activists might have hoped, the state-mandated erasure of the incident has been extremely effective. Only 15 out of 100 university students in Beijing recognize the iconic picture of “Tank Man” a demonstrator blocking the path of a line of tanks, according to The People’s Republic of Amnesia, a new book on the topic by NPR correspondent Louisa Lim. …

Scouring the Chinese internet for references to June 4 has become an annual event for the government’s censors, but this year’s efforts have gone further than ever before. All Google services in China, including gmail, are now being blocked on the mainland. … As in previous years, even circuitous mentions of June 4 on social media—including the Chinese characters for six and four together, for the date of June 4, the search term “four, open fire” or “25 years“— are being swiftly deleted by censors. China’s version of Wikipedia, Baike, has no entry for the entire year of 1989...

In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11”...

But the president’s attitude seems to me in some ways ill-suited for the autocratic challenge. First, he might have the balance wrong between overreach and underreach. Perhaps drawing on the Iraq example, President Obama believes America’s problems have not been caused by too much restraint, but by overreach and hubris.

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake.

Today David Brooks waxes lyrical about Kagan, just as he might have before the Iraq War – while completely ignoring the core conservative insight that these foreign and alien cultures and societies are simply beyond our ability to control or direct with any real practical wisdom. No admirer of Oakeshott can possibly believe that the US’ attempt to coax and mold other countries into our political model would lead to anything but tears. What staggers me is that, after Iraq, this point still hasn’t been absorbed by the neocons. There has been no chastening. There is no humility. And there is precious little conservatism.

...of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage[d]...as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

Here in the home of the brave, all we need to annihilate the memory of Conservatism's highest crimes and most criminal incompetence is for enough confederates with enough money and influence to go along with the illusion.

Here in America, all we ever need in order to forget any inconvenient thing is the soft bigotry of collective fabrication.

The dancing was desperate, the music was worse
They bury your dreams and dig up the worthless

"Clinton's behavior is truly Nixonian. And it is worse in one way. Nixon's actions, however neurotic and criminal, were motivated by and connected to the exercise of presidential power. He knew the place he occupied, and he was determined not to give it up to those he regarded as 'enemies.' Clinton acted--and still, even in his supposed mea culpa, acts--as if he does not recognize what it means to be president of the United States."

-- David Broder, Washington Post (8/19/98)

Boehner Announces Select Committee On Benghazi To Satisfy Restless Donors

By karoli May 3, 2014 7:00 am

Friday afternoon, Speaker John Boehner announced that he would appoint a select committee on Benghazi. It's no surprise -- they've been planning to do it for at least a year.

Speaker John Boehner announced Friday afternoon that he will appoint a select committee to further investigate Benghazi. Not because there's anything there to investigate, you understand, but as Ed Henry admits in the video, it keeps their base frothing at the mouth.

This is no surprise. It was planned exactly one year ago when narratives were formed in order to push Darrell Issa and John Boehner into appointing a select committee with subpoena power to gin up the base and paper the White House with meaningless subpoenas for the next three years.

One Year Ago, a Groundswell

On May 8, 2013, the online conservative "messaging" group known as Groundswell convened their weekly meeting in Washington, DC.

First up on the agenda was Benghazi, and the question of when they would get their select committee with subpoena power. This was so important to Groundswell's leadership that they forced late-night meetings with John Boehner and Darrell Issa. From the transcript of the recording:

Um, Frank [Gaffney] and I had -- I'm sorry -- Frank and I actually had meetings last night with Speaker Boehner and Representative Issa also. We've been pushing with the support of Congressman Wolf as well as Congressman Gohmert for a special committee. And I think it's okay to share with you, wouldn't you say so Frank, that the Speaker was, I thought he was very coherent last night when we talked about this. And that he believes that the process needs to play out before we get a special committee. His concern is that the media will portray this as just simply an attempt to bring down the Obama administration, until their current committee system plays itself out.

He continues:

Again, the key takeaway here is we're not backing away from a special committee, we're still pushing for that. But we kind of have a pledge from both, I think Issa and the Speaker, that they want the system to play out a little more before they start to call for that. The Speaker did say he's not opposed to it but he wants to let the committee structure as it stands right now continue until it would potentially merit bringing a special committee.

...

...

Is the Deep Throat story over? Yes, in the sense that it will no longer be treated as a mystery. In spite of the million questions we'll be hearing--and there are and will be many serious questions--the MSM will stick with the heroic narrative. Mr. Felt was Deep Throat. Deep Throat was a great man who helped a great newspaper put the stop to the lies and abuses of an out-of-control White House. End of story. Why? Because in celebrating this story in a certain way journalists of a certain age celebrate themselves. Because to bring unwelcome and unwanted skepticism to the narrative would be to deny 20th-century journalism--and 21st-century journalists--their great claim to glory. Because the MSM is still liberal, and the great Satan of all liberals, still, is Richard Nixon. And because, as Ben Bradlee might say, It's a goddamn good story.

Or as they put it in yet another John Ford masterpiece, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend."

John Kerry:   This president has taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see. Health-care costs for the average American have gone up 64 percent; tuitions have gone up 35 percent; gasoline prices up 30 percent; Medicare premiums went up 17 percent a few days ago; prescription drugs are up 12 percent a year. 

But guess what, America? The wages of Americans have gone down. The jobs that are being created in Arizona right now are paying about $13,700 less than the jobs that we're losing.

And the president just walks on by this problem. The fact is that he's cut job-training money. $1 billion was cut. They only added a little bit back this year because it's an election year.

They've cut the Pell Grants and the Perkins loans to help kids be able to go to college.

They've cut the training money. They've wound up not even extending unemployment benefits and not even extending health care to those people who are unemployed.

...

The president decided to give it to the wealthiest Americans in a tax cut. Now, Alan Greenspan, who I think has done a terrific job in monetary policy, supports the president's tax cut. I don't. I support it for the middle class, not that part of it that goes to people earning more than $200,000 a year.

And when I roll it back and we invest in the things that I have talked about to move our economy, we're going to grow sufficiently, it would begin to cut the deficit in half, and we get back to where we were at the end of the 1990s when we balanced the budget and paid down the debt of this country.

Same-Sex Marriage Issue Key to Some G.O.P. Races

By JAMES DAO

Published: November 4, 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 3 - Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio and Senator Jim Bunning in Kentucky...

In favor of crippling deficits as far as the eye can see:      62,040,610 

Opposed to crippling deficits as far as the eye can see:   59,028,444 

-- Party of Personal Responsibility and swept the most profligate, incompetent and treasonous administration in American history back into power.

...They have always believed that deficits are Worse than Nine Hitlers. 

...Deficits can only be solved by stomping the fuck out the poor, the weak, the sick, the elderly, the unemployed and various other moochers and takers.

...Anyone who disagrees that Deficits are Worse than Nine Hitlers and can only be solved by stomping the fuck out the poor, the weak, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed is Deeply Unserious.

...Absolutely nothing of what I just told you about the last eight years ever happened.