Black Conservative Ken Blackwell, of the American Family Association wants you to know that pressing Israel to make peace with the Palestinians would be one of the great crimes in history, like Stalin blockading West Berlin, Hitler Invading Poland, or Lincoln dealing a death knell to the Confederacy at the Battle of Vicksburg:

Cutting Israel in half will be fatal.

When the town of Vicksburg fell in 1863, President Lincoln knew it was the death knell of the Confederacy. “The father of waters flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln said, poetically describing the Union’s new control over the length of the Mississippi River.

Contiguous, or contiguity, the noun. That’s what the Confederates lost at Vicksburg. Their new nation was cut in two. It withered and died.

So this is the dance a black man has to dance in order to favor with the Teabaggers, eh, Ken?

Well, it’s that time of year again in congress: the time of year when demagogic politicians produce misleading reports to prove to their ignorant constituents just how ridiculous scientists are for locking themselves up in their laboratories and conducting absurd experiments when they should be at home watching Dancing with the Stars or Desperate Housewives like everybody else. Read more »

For all the delight we have taken in observing Newt Gingrich’s recent self-immolation, one of the more pleasurable developments of the one-time Speaker of the House’s train-wreck is the laughable reaction it triggered in Gingrich press secretary Rick Tyler. Here’s Tyler’s statement, a harried, defensive and ultimately counter-productive explosion of purple prose, delivered to a reporter for The Huffington Post not long after Gingrich’s now notorious Meet The Press interview:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding, Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

The pen is, as they say, mightier than the sword, but this statement reminds us of nothing so much as that scene in The Bourne Identity where Matt Damon’s character fights off an assassin with a ballpoint pen… except imagine that rather than disabling the assassin with a well placed jab to the neck, the scene had ended with Damon’s caracter stabbing himself in the eye. Shadenfreude is never so enjoyable as when the victim is a pompous ass.

Reading this delightful tract brought back fond memories of other great moments in right-wing literary hackery, and so we invite you to take a trip down memory lane and relive the best bad writing by right-wing luminaries of the last several decades… Read more »

“…let me say on the record, any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood”

—Newt Gingrich

This really is a most remarkable variation on the old “Who you gonna believe: me or your lying eyes?” defense. And really, we haven’t seen as much ass kissing and back tracking on an issue since early 2009, when the entire GOP leadership took turns making pilgrimages to Rush Limbaugh’s show to apologize to that enormous gasbag for suggesting he was wrong about some issue or another.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

And now, your moment of unintentional journalistic levity, courtesy of the New York Times front page this morning:

As if any further proof were needed that electing GOP condidates to office is akin to putting the lunatics in charge of the asylum, word comes from Florida that Teabag Governor Rick Scott is set to sign a bill that is… well, I guess, sorta the GOP version of Health Care Reform. And what does this bill entail? The bill would prevent pediatricians from asking the parents of their patients whether they have guns at home, and whether said guns are properly secured from their children. I.shit.you.not: Read more »

It boggles the mind to think that people like Alan Simpson are taken seriously as experts on the Federal budget and the measures that will have to be taken if we want future Federal revenues more closely match expenditures. The Huffington Post reports on a recent speech that Simpson gave to a Financial Industry group, in which he lambasted Social Security as a “ponzi scheme” and repeated a misleading statistic on life expectancy to justify the claim that the program was never meant to cover as many people as it does now, for as long as it does now:

Simpson argued that Social Security was originally intended more as a welfare program.

“It was never intended as a retirement program. It was set up in ‘37 and ‘38 to take care of people who were in distress — ditch diggers, wage earners — it was to give them 43 percent of the replacement rate of their wages. The [life expectancy] was 63. That’s why they set retirement age at 65” for Social Security, he said.

But Simpson’s assessment of the program’s genesis relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the significance of average life expectancy in an era that was characterized by relatively high rates of infant mortality. Read more »