Today’s Pantload spoor, in the once-venerated LATimes:

The ‘ought’ decade
What did it all mean, if anything?

Does anyone know what we’re supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We’re coming up on the last year of it and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the “oughts,” as in, “back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting.”

This is pretty easy: This decade means that if a bunch of neoconservative assholes elect and prop a wholly incompetent President for two terms, and support unflinchingly his disastrous policies, decisions, and even incompetence, we can well and truly fuck over nearly every facet of this country’s existence and create a disaster of nearly unprecedented magnatude.

Let’s just call this decade “The Neoconservative Clusterfuck.”

Pantload tries to minimize the impact of Bush’s presidency on this decade — by lying his dumb, fat ass off:

Neither the pro-Bush nor anti-Bush segments of society seemed to control the commanding heights of the popular culture. After 9/11, the Bushian forces seemed to dominate — freedom fries, “24,” the Dixie Chicks’ implosion — but that didn’t last long. And, with the exception of a brief counter-Bush surge led by the lefty blogosphere, Jon Stewart and the re-imagined coffeehouse rock version of the Dixie Chicks, the battle for decade dominance has been between a fizzle and a deadlock.

The battle between pro and anti-Bush forces a deadlock?? Does this stupid motherfucker think that the Battle of Trafalgar was a draw? If Jonah’s head weren’t so firmly lodged in his transverse colon, he might have noticed that most recent Presidential election was largely about Bush and which candidates supported President Dumbshit and his disastrous policies. Torture, black site prisons, domestic spying, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, the threatened failure of all major auto companies and our entire financial system are all lingering wounds inflicted by Bushism and Neoconservatism in the psyche of most Americans — Pantloadian dumbshits excluded. The fact that Bush and his National Security Advisor, Condi Rice chose to ignore a warning that BIN LADIN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN US and focus on anti-missile schemes and Saddam’s imaginary WMDs may have contributed to the staggering cost of September 11 eludes teh Pantload.

In his mind, Bush is irrelevant to the decade because, “Virtually all of the anti-war or anti-Bush screeds put out by Hollywood over the last year, including Oliver Stone’s latest doggerel, have bombed.” Yeah, and becuase “Pearl Harbor” was a shitty movie that didn’t draw, the actual Japanese attack of December 7 was an insignificant event.

And yet Bush, the reality television show, is immensely popular all around the globe, with tens of millions of hits on You Tube:

It’s hard to tell sometimes if Goldberg is actually disingenuous to make some of the arguments he does, or whether sheer stupidity continues to be the driving force. Given his track record, I’m betting on the latter.

But two things I am sure of: the Neoconservative Clusterfuck decade is coming to a close, and it’s long past time for the Times to give Jonah the “Jonah Lift.”

Been busy with other things, recovering from a minor health issue, plus the sense of relief after Obama’s election diminished any sense of urgency. But the blogging muse may be returning. . . .

Assmissile’s hagiographic rendering of the life of the inarticulate, inept W continues:

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn’t raise his standards, he will exceed Bush’s total before he is inaugurated.

Assmissile should add: Bush’s flatulence smells like roses and his stool tastes like ambrosia. Saying that Obama should pattern his public speaking after George Bush is like saying Kobe Bryant should pattern his basketball game after Mark Landsberger.

Where the hell was this idiot when Bush said this:

Or this:

I could go on, ad infinitem.

Of course, Hinderaker is the myopic who once called Bush a man of “extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.” And referred to W as “our Churchill,” and in doing so managing to miss some critical distinctions between the two men, starting with the fact that Churchill likely wrote more books than Bush ever read.

Go ahead and take Joe Lieberman, please:

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has reached out to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) about the prospect of joining the Republican Conference, but Lieberman is still bargaining with Democratic leaders to keep his chairmanship, according to Senate aides in both parties.

“They’ve been talking,” McConnell spokesman Don Stewart said.

A Lieberman aide cautioned that “Sen. Lieberman’s preference is to stay in the caucus, but he’s going to keep all his options open. McConnell has reached out to him, and at this stage, his position is he wants to remain in the caucus but losing the chairmanship is unacceptable.”

As Steve Benen points out, what Joe “finds ‘unacceptable’ is of no consequence.” Screw Lieberman. He not only backed McCain, he actively campaigned for him and disparaged the Democratic candidate. On top of that he’s backed Bush’s bankrupt policy on Iraq for 5 years.

Let him join the Republicans. He won’t have a committee chairmanship with them. If he feels marginalized now, wait until he has to go to the GOP to back his next run for reelection. With Palinsheviks out to purge the ideologically impure moderates from the GOP, he’s really going to feel at home.

Joe has no where to go. If he wants to caucus with the Republicans, let him go ahead. He’s been worse than useless to the Democratic party for years anyway.

Right wing tool and War Pimp Ledeen is suddenly concerned about the “ignorance” of the American electorate.

What makes me angriest: that there is no outcry against election fraud; that the media have become pure political instruments; that our “educational system” has produced an ignorant electorate.

Years and years ago, during Watergate, Barbara and I were living in Rome, and we had lots of journalist friends (I was then a correspondent for The New Republic, so…we saw lots of Italian journalists). They were all openly jealous of America, because they saw American journalism as clearly superior to theirs. American journalists reported, while they, the Italians, were doing politics. “We could bring down our entire Political Class,” they would say, “we all have information so devastating that no politician could survive,” but they didn’t publish it, because they didn’t see an acceptable alternative. We would tell them that their job was not to make political decisions, but to report the news, and let the people decide. But they couldn’t; they were doing politics. And we felt superior, because American journalism, we thought, just reported the news and let the people decide.

Well, that’s over and done with now. Never before has the ignorance of the electorate been so intensely cultivated as in this election. We all know that major publications and broadcasters have simply refused to report news, and what they did report was spun politically. And among the stories they are not reporting, is the massive electoral fraud, from the “where is all that money coming from?” to the “how dare state officials refuse to verify the identity of voters?” one, to the refusal to report, day by day, on Joe Biden’s scandalously inept, incompetent, and often meretricious campaign. Instead, they obsess on every real and imagined misstatement by Sarah Palin, who for me has been the most attractive of the four candidates.

In Ledeen’s world, “ignorance” equates to the refusal of the American electorate to be distracted by all the peripheral bullshit the Right threw against the wall, and the unwillingness of the Press to follow the lead of Judy Miller and astroturf Republican bullshit straight onto the front page any longer, somehow marks its demise as a worthy institution.

He scorns the American electorate for not being susceptible to the Right’s stream of ACORN-Socialist-Ayers-Voting Fraud-Islamofacism-fear, the way GOP-crafted memes dominated previous electoral cycles. In his mind, it was the “ignorance” of the American people which made them unwilling to swallow the foreign policy by osmosis crap, whereby Palin gained foreign policy experience invisibly wafting across the Bering Straight. They were concerned with the actual statements of a candidate, rather than the imagined conspiracies of brown people illegally voting fabricated by GOP propagandists.

The American people were understandably unwilling to buy into 4 more years of the same old neocon bullshit, not willing to buy into the fatuous crap that the Ledeens of the world dished up as a kind of intellectual dessert the last 8 years. That’s not ignorance, that’s survival instinct.

Donald over at the American Power has lost his mind with grief. Obama isn’t a communist or a Muslim, he’s just, well, the Devil or Beezleobama.

Yes, that’s right … if you meet him, look out, give him some sympathy. Bow down low, “The One” is here, and you must pay due penitence for the sins of your fathers, your white fathers. If not, he’ll lay your soul to waste with the phenomenal power of the American state - a state structure now to be captured - more heavily than ever before - like nothing James Madison envisioned - by the largest radical left-wing interest group contingent in U.S. history.

~~~

This I believe of Barack Obama: Not imminent physical destruction of our nation (though not completely discounted), but destruction nonetheless. Destruction of the moral light that never lets the malignant growth of evil roll across the land. No, America’s enemies will get a respite, where they can regroup and reconsider what they want from America. There will be a reckoning, at some point, of course. Because even those who have been hoodwinked by the hope-i-ness of change will not long tolerate the yoke of Third World despotism and terror over this proud nation. A despotism seeking to behead the American individual, and the culture that bore him - all of this, dearest Americans, faster than you can say Madrid 2004.

My masthead is now black in mourning for the missed opportunity of victory in John McCain’s moral right and history. This change is permanent, at least as far as my current [ed: exceedingly fragile] state of mind dictates.

Like I said, Right Blogostan is having a collective stroke. A continuation of Republican misrule represented salvation to them, and a change in course during a gale away from the lee shore, a form of damnation.

Roger Simon thinks WSJ author Jeff Shapiro is “on to something” when he says the GOP has lost its way and America has suffered because it was insufficiently loyal to George W. Bush.

Shapiro writes:

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

Of all the “flaws” of all the men in all the world, the one which has done the least amount of damage to the GOP, and to America, has been the flaw of not being loyal enough to George W. Bush. Too much loyalty, too much blind allegiance, and too much unquestioning partisan support of Bush, his disastrous policies, and his incompetent appointments have wrought destruction on America, which ultimately blew back on the GOP and John McCain. That anyone could postulate that the people who followed Bush into Iraq on the flimsiest of pretenses, who claimed that Bush could not foresee the predictable breach of New Orleans levees, who stood by every incompetent decision and policy of Bush harmed America because they were not sufficiently loyal to Bush demonstrates a cognitive dissonance of epic magnitude. Right Blogostan is having a collective stroke.

Or: Assmissile, then and now.

Powerline’s Assmissile, reflecting on Obama’s historic election victory:

No Landslide

Obama won around 52 percent of the popular vote, defeating John McCain by between five and six points. That’s nothing like the true landslides of the past: Reagan by ten points in 1980 and 18 in 1984; Nixon by 23 in 1972; or even Bush by eight in 1988. . . . [ed: asinine whining about the media failing to recognize Bush's greatness, etc.]

. . . . Despite all of this, Obama mustered only a five-point win. [ed: actually, it was 6]

. . . . Something of the same sort happened in Congress. The Democrats were awash with money, outspending their opponents in nearly every contested race. Democratic candidates benefited from the new registrations and the Obama phenomenon. In the Senate, they had easy pickings because the seats that were up this year were overwhelmingly Republican.

Yet here too, the Democrats’ results, while positive, were not of the landslide variety. At the moment it appears that they will gain five seats in the Senate and 20 in the House.

Assmissile, four years ago:

The Mandate Grows

Several readers have pointed out that as the vote-counting process is completed, President Bush’s margin of victory continues to grow. His popular vote advantage is now 52% to 47%, and he won by a whopping 4.7 million votes! The election wasn’t close after all.

CORRECTION: Oops, never mind. I’m not sure just where the error was made, but the Yahoo and CNN figures are back to 51% to 48%. Which, of course, is plenty.

A 51-48% victory and 3 million vote margin was a mandate and, of course, “plenty.” But Obama’s defeat of McCain by “only” 52-46% with a mere 7.5 million vote margin is “no landslide” and unimpressive.

We elected the black guy President!

One day, about 40 years ago, my cousins came over to my house. My father’s older sister, my first cousin, was 25 years older than me. She had married a black man and had children. Who, unsurprisingly, were somewhat darker complected than me. And all the other families in our neighborhood. We lived in California, but de facto segregation was still very much the rule.

I knew them just as my cousins.

We had been playing in the front yard for a while when we were called in for dinner. As I walked towards my front door, a kid who had moved in next door a couple of months ago, from Kentucky or some such border state. He called me over and asked me, “What are the niggers doing at your house?” He didn’t say it with any particular animosity, more like amazement. I was stunned; it had never occured to me that my cousins were, in the eyes of others, simply “niggers.” I walked away. I don’t know if I ever spoke to that kid again.

I never thought I’d see the day when a black man would be elected President of the United States. Not only that, after 8 years of Bush I despaired ever seeing the day when a truly intelligent and intellectually curious person was elected to the presidency.

It’s a monumental achievement. Not just seeing an African American ascend to the White House, but seeing a person with the temprament and intellect needed to succeed in the job. Niether accomplishment can be understated, in this day and age.

Pantload calls it “Electoral Woolgathering” but it’s really just a mental circle jerk:

I was just playing with the RCP electoral map for the first time in a while (I used to play with it all the time, but then it got depressing). And I have to say, it’s actually much easier to see how McCain could pull it off than I had thought. That’s not to say McCain’s got a cakewalk ahead of him. Going purely by the stats, you have to expect Obama to pull it out. But I just thought it would be much harder to get McCain past 270 than it is. If McCain can win Pennsylvania, he can be president.

Even if you change Pennsylvania to McCain (and RCP shows a 7.6 average Obama lead there) then McCain still needs to hold every state leaning his way and capture another 96 electoral votes. In other words, he has to pull off the upset in Pennsylvania and win virtually every other battleground state. Losing either Ohio or Florida is fatal to McCain, even if he could win Pennsylvania. Loss of any two of Virgina, Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri or Georgia would tip the election to Obama, even if McCain takes Ohio and Florida. Plus, RCP shows North Dakota, Montana and Arizona as tossups.

So if McCain can win Pennsylvania he “can be president,” assuming he wins in Ohio and Florida, and wins 5 out of 6 in Virgina, Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.