Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Geez… hyperbole much?

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that a “face-off is brewing between labor and employers” in regards to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would aid American workers in the path toward unionization. Indeed, despite the bill having widespread public support, the debate surrounding it is becoming increasingly vitriolic.

The Wonk Room previously highlighted Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus’ assertion that retailers who are not fighting the Free Choice Act “should be shot.” Now, the United States Chamber of Commerce has upped the ante, saying that the “coming fight in Congress over the issue” is a “firestorm bordering on Armageddon.”

Big bidness really has a pathological hatred for unions, don’t they? It’s just a wee bit off-balance. Someone needs to feed them some Prozac, methinks.

In other pathological Con news, the tilting at imaginary windmills is getting out of hand:

And speaking of the Fairness Doctrine, paranoia, and self-pity, it appears the Media Research Center has apparently begun an organized campaign to combat a policy initiative that doesn’t exist. My friend Alex Koppelman at Salon has the report:

Monday, the MRC announced the formation of the Free Speech Alliance, a group dedicated to fighting against the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, an old FCC regulation that mandated equal time for opposing viewpoints in opinion programming. The move was announced in a post on MRC’s blog, Newsbusters, that was titled “The Free Speech Alliance Declares War on the ‘Censorship Doctrine.'”

The MRC is also asking people to sign a petition against revival of the regulation. “In 1987, President Ronald Reagan rescinded the Fairness Doctrine and since then, talk radio has flourished. Conservatives dominate it, and liberals can’t stand it. By re-instating the Fairness Doctrine, liberals would effectively silence the conservative leaders of the day … and would essentially take control of all forms of media,” the group says in an introduction on the Web page that hosts the petition. On the same page, the MRC warns, “In recent months, the groundswell for reinstatement is intensifying. In fact, a growing number of liberal leaders in Washington, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have openly stated their intent to do so.”

Actually, that’s not even close to true. Obama opposes the idea, Pelosi hasn’t “openly stated” anything about pursuing this, and Reid’s office told Salon that the Senate Majority Leader “is not contemplating anything like that.” The “groundswell for reinstatement” exists only in the overactive imaginations of paranoid right-wing activists.

And yet, here we are. The MRC is not only railing against a policy proposal that doesn’t exist, it’s created an organization committed to fighting a policy proposal that doesn’t exist. To help in the endeavor against the imaginary foe, the MRC has roped in Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Women for America, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, among others, to help.

How pathetic is that? It’s starting to seem as though universal healthcare is a great idea not just to save families from going bankrupt on medical debt, but to ensure that our right wing gets the mental health treatment they so obviously need. We’re going to have to start spiking their water with Risperdol to take care of those paranoid delusions and allow them to live healthy, productive, reality-based lives.

While we’re medicating folks for their psychosis, we need to bump Rep. Hunter (no relation) up to the front of the line:

Freshman Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA), son of former GOP presidential candidate Duncan Hunter, recently was elected to Congress after campaigning on a staunch anti-immigration platform.

During an interview with MSNBC’s Luke Russert today, Hunter defended his campaign pledge to end citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, arguing immigration increases domestic crime. As his evidence, Hunter made the outlandish and grossly inaccurate claim that Tijuana, Mexico has more crime than “Iraq and Afghanistan”:

HUNTER: In San Diego, we face a lot of crime. … There’s been more murders in Tijuana, Mexico than there have been in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s more dangerous to go to Mexico from San Diego than it is to fly over and stroll around a Baghdad market.

[snip]

Hunter is unfortunately correct that violence in Mexico has ballooned in recent years, in part due to the ongoing drug wars. At least 4,000 have died this year in drug-related violence, according to the AP. Tijuana has also seen a surge in violence.

But to claim that there are more murders in the city of Tijuana than there are in “Iraq and Afghanistan” is absurd. In Tijuana, “at least 200 people have been killed in drug violence this year,” the Washington Post reported in June. But in the month of July 2008 alone, there were approximately 500 civilian fatalities in Iraq. There have been roughly 700 deaths this year in Afghanistan.

Something tells me Rep. Hunter has been watching too many movies, mainlining too many GOP talking points, and forgetting to take his anti-psychotics again. I say we send him on vacation: let him stroll a week in Tijuana, and a week in Baghdad. If he lives through the experience, he can tell us which one’s really more dangerous.

When trying to treat the mentally ill, it’s vitally important not to help them feed their delusions. The last thing you should do is play along. Someone needs to let the MSM know:

This really isn’t complicated. President Bush was not being “blunt” or showing “candor” when he told ABC News in an interview published yesterday that his biggest regret was the failure of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Rather, he was whitewashing away his own role in the fisaco by promoting the demonstrable falsehood that there was no available evidence or information that argued against war and that he was merely fooled into invading Iraq solely by the bad intel.

The big news orgs seem eager to help Bush do this. Not a single one of their reports on the interview that we can find bothered to tell readers that there was plenty of good intel — ignored by the Bush administration — saying that Saddam wasn’t the threat Bush was claiming he was. Nor did any of them bother mentioning that the weapons inspectors in Iraq were saying the same thing — something that also went ignored.

These facts are absolutely central to understanding Bush’s efforts to falsify history in yesterday’s interview.

They apparently will need therapy as well, as they seem to have a ginormous co-dependency problem.

Somehow, someday, we’ll have a healthy body politic again. Possibly after we’ve stuck the entire right wing in nice padded rooms.

Today’s opining on the public discourse.

Somebody needs to hit Bill O’Reilly with a really fucking big clue-by-four:

Today on the Radio Factor, a listener called in to tell Bill O’Reilly that she had “zero confidence” in Obama’s ability to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the course of her call, the listener expressed mock concern for the detainees that were mistreated there. O’Reilly, apparently missing the caller’s sarcastic tone, interrupted her to falsely claim that “no proof” exists to back-up accusations of mistreatment and that his two tours of the prison facility confirm that:

OREILLY: [T]here are accusations of mistreatment at Guantanamo, but there’s certainly no proof that ever happened. I think they were rough in the beginning after 9/11, that some stuff happened that shouldn’t have, but I went there twice and we have good contacts there. And, I think that they basically got that under control pretty quickly.

[snip]

Despite O’Reilly’s claims, “proof” of mistreatment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay does exist. In 2004, the Red Cross documented “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees while inspecting the facility. Perhaps more disturbing, the Guardian reported last year:

Captives at Guantánamo Bay were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves, an FBI report has revealed. … One witness said he saw a barefoot detainee shaking with cold because the air conditioning had bought the temperature close to freezing.

But, y’know, he has good contacts who don’t let him see this stuff, so it obviously doesn’t happen.

It’ll be interesting if the day ever comes when O’Reilly ever admits he’s a raving fucktard. Bush is edging closer to that moment, and it’s vastly entertaining:

We’ve heard Bush express some various regrets in recent years, but I think this one is a first.

Looking back on his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush pinpointed incorrect intelligence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as “biggest regret of all the presidency.”

“I think I was unprepared for war,” Bush told ABC News’ Charlie Gibson in an interview airing today on “World News.”

“In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, ‘Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack,'” he said. “In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.”

Bush, who has been a stalwart defender of the war in Iraq and maintaining U.S. troop presence there, said, in retrospect, the war exceeded his expectations.

The president added, “I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.” Asked if he would have gone to war if he knew Iraq did not have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Bush said, “That is a do-over that I can’t do.”

He “wishes the intelligence had been different.” Well, I wish he’d listened to it in the first fucking place. As I recall, there was plenty of good intel pointing to the fact that his own intel was fabricated, made up, and nothing but a pack of neocon lies, but that’s not what he wanted to hear, so he discarded it.

But at least this twinge of regret is a start. Now, if we could just get him to admit that he should’ve been more interested in what bin Laden was doing rather than in his brush-clearing issues, that would be fantastic.

It might also be nice if he’d admit we’re in a recession of his own making:

It’s common now to hear Bush administration officials, asked about the financial crisis, insist that they had no idea this meltdown was coming. Unfortunately, they were warned, but ignored the concerns.

The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents. […]

Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way. […]

The administration’s blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of its governing philosophy, which trusted market forces and discounted the value of government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.

Many of the banks that fought to undermine the proposals by some regulators are now either out of business or accepting billions in federal aid to recover from a mortgage crisis they insisted would never come. Many executives remain in high-paying jobs, even after their assurances were proved false.

More than three years ago, bank regulators “proposed new guidelines for banks writing risky loans,” and looking over the proposals — “banks would have been required to increase efforts to verify that buyers actually had jobs and could afford houses,” and “regulators proposed a cap on risky mortgages so a string of defaults wouldn’t be crippling” — it’s easy to see how regulations could have prevented the worst.

However, it seems like Bush and his merry band of ravening fuckwits are bound and determined not to use the “r” word:

Earlier today, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) announced that “the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007, making official what most Americans have already believed about the state of the economy.” The group, which the White House has previously pointed to as the determinative body for declaring a recession, said in a statement that the “decline in economic activity” after Dec.
‘07 “wa
s large enough to qualify as a recession.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto commented on the news “without ever actually using the word ‘recession.’” Instead, Fratto released a statement saying the White House was focused on what they “can do for the economy right now.”

Yup. Denying reality to the bitter end.

After all of that, we could probably use some entertainment, eh? Check out Sarah Palin’s stump speeches for Saxby Chambliss. If you suspected the woman hasn’t got an original thought in her head, you’d be right:

Today, Gov. Sarah Palin traveled to Georgia to campaign for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R), who faces a tough runoff election tomorrow against Democratic challenger Jim Martin. In the first of four stops today, in Augusta, Palin told the crowd, “The eyes of the nation are on you,” adding, “The stakes are so high” and that “America is counting on you.”

Yet despite Palin’s insistence on the importance of the Chambliss race, she apparently couldn’t bring herself to write a new stump speech. Instead, she recycled many of her favorite lines from this fall, substituting Chambliss’ name for Sen. John McCain’s…

Enjoy the examples. And enjoy the thought that soon, most of these people are going to be as irrelevant as yesterday’s tea bag.