From CBS Face The Nation, May 29, 2011:

HARRY SMITH: Let’s talk about the cutting. You meet with Vice President Joe Biden twice a week, several hours each meeting. The rumblings we’re hearing from it is that you’re actuallymaking progress. Have you really isolated a trillion dollars in– in budget deficit reductions?

REPRESENTATIVE ERIC CANTOR: Those– those talks which actually we’ve– we’ve been meeting for I think over three weeks now, they have been, I think, all po– all positive. Everything is on the table. We’ve said as Republicans we’re not going to go for tax increases. [Emphasis mine]

HARRY SMITH: Mm-Hm.

REPRESENTATIVE ERIC CANTOR: I think the administration gets that.

HARRY SMITH: Right.

REPRESENTATIVE ERIC CANTOR: But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as cuts. And I can see, yes, we– we can accomplish well over a trillion dollars in cuts.

 This is what “everything is on the table” means to a Republican. This is what compromise means to a Republican: The revenue side of the Federal budget remains off limts, un touchable, sacrosanct so don’t even ask. But Eric Cantor and his Republican cohorts will graciously allow Democrats to participate in the process by which spending on senior citizens, the poor, our schools, our roads and other physical infrastructure, our public safety, our parks, environmental enforcement and cleanup, and our national defense is slashed and burned.

That’s compromise, Republican style.

And, no, you didn’t need to ask if Harry Smith pointed this absurdity out to Cantor. Of course he didn’t. And you knew that, without even reading the transcript.

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?

So I ordered the Stinque water bottle (made in Switzerland!) and it’s here! And it’s quality gear! And what does it say?

Read more »

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: