Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t try, don’t do @#$%ing anything

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 5 Comments

"Everybody calm down. We're going to wait until this whole opposition party thing blows over."

Lately, watching the Democratic senatorial caucus has been like watching your toddler take his first few tentative steps forward, only to see the cat, shriek in terror and sit down until someone tells him what to do. Yesterday, the Senate voted 56 to 43 to begin debate on the Pentagon spending bill that would have ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. If you’ve been unfamiliar with the last two years of Senate proceedings, 56 to 43 is a loss. Because of the threat of filibuster, Democrats need 60 votes to win anything, whereas the Republicans need 41. Never mind that the filibuster hasn’t actually been used since the Democrats won the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Republican senators might do it, and that’s why Democrats scrambled and compromised to get 60 votes to pass health care, 60 votes to pass financial reform, 60 votes to pass anything more significant than a renewal of Flag Day. So, having won the vote to move forward with a plan to repeal DADT supported by the President, the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, Democrats in the Senate conceded defeat.

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Obama’s Islam, polls and belief as personal expression

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

A Tea Party demonstrator embraces Sarah Palin's made-up Twitter word, for reasons that are probably semiotically complex.

Smick sent me an interesting email yesterday about anonymous polls—particularly this one, which holds that 46% of Republicans believe that President Obama is a Muslim. When you think about it, that number is absurdly high. The notion that almost half of the Republican Party genuinely believes that the President of the United States secretly practices a religion—different from the one practiced at the church he attended in Chicago for years, which posed his most serious PR problem during the 2008 campaign—and that he has successfully hidden his practice from the most aggressive media in history, despite having two young children who will say anything once you get a couple juice boxes in them, is perhaps too fantastic to accept. Certainly, there are wingnuts. But half the party? That’s more agreement than could initially be mustered on the issue of Mitt Romney versus Mike Huckabee.

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Unintentionally Hilarious: Palin likely in 2012

By Dan Brooks in Unintentionally Hilarious 4 Comments

The human equivalent of an American flag pin made of colored rhinestones

According to Jonathan Chait at the New Republic, Sarah Palin will run for President in 2012. It’s a surprise announcement roughly as surprising as the announcement that the cat will lick itself around noon—sure, there are a lot of reasons why she wouldn’t, but that is also the kind of thing she is prone to do. As Chait points out, Democrats might regard a Palin nomination as a free ticket back into the White House. “But here’s the thing,” he writes, “no one is ‘unelectable.'” Thus begins the rush to assert that Sarah Palin would be a qualified, serious candidate in 2012—a rush by which political commentators, in their natural desire to take up a contrarian position, all wind up saying the same thing. In preparation for an election that may well be determined by how many Americans take up our civic duty to call stupid statements stupid, I’m inaugurating a brand-new feature called Unintentionally Hilarious.

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Dammit.

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments

The Combat! blog server is sick, which is confusing and frightening to those of us who spent way too much time understanding structural linguistics and way too little time understanding Apache servers. Unless the rage beam currently shooting out of my mouth hits a mirror and vaporizes me, we’ll be back on Monday. In the meantime, enjoy this amazing video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iANRO3I30nM&feature=player_embedded

What the Tea Party means: Christine O’Donnell

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 3 Comments

Everybody loves her: the white, the old, the old and white, the asked to stand there...

Partly because it’s the most vital movement in contemporary politics and partly because they’re hilarious, we’ve spent over a year now trying to figure out what the Tea Party means. While several of the philosophical questions—and even some of the ontological ones—remain unanswered, Tuesday made one practical outcome clear. Christine O’Donnell has defeated heavily-favored Delaware legislator Michael Castle in the Republican senate primary, thanks to the enthusiastic backing of the Tea Party. Where Castle polled favorably against likely Democratic opponents in the general, O’Donnell does not. It might be because she’s crazy. “A lot of people said we can’t win the general election; yes we can!” she told the Times. “It will be hard work, but we can win if those same people who fought against me work just as hard for me.” Two things: 1) Agreed that Christine O’Donnell will win the election if the people who don’t like her start liking her and 2) now she owes Barack Obama a nickel.

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