US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

Donald Trump really is just an overgrown spoiled rich man's son.

so are most of the successful "small business owners" who fund the chamber of commerce. it's refreshing to see them picked on by proxy

the shameless bitch just compared taxes to the holocaust

I hate Sarah Palin and support progressive policies but it'd be super-awesome if people who share my values would strike the misogynist term "bitch" from their politics-talking vocabularies

sorry I see it was Michelle Bachmann. Another person who when people haul out the misogynist epithets I think "great job there dude, that totally helps"

shameless asshole then. better?

you might not see the difference, but yes, better

Donald Trump possesses a kind of capitalist ur-power that eludes Obama, but Obama's power is oddly complementary. That is, Trump can get away with all sorts of crazy shit with no (or virtually no) repercussions that Obama could not get away with - publicly calling the Chinese "motherfuckers" and batshit stuff like that. Yet Obama can get away with things that Trump cannot do - like bomb countries and stuff. Which makes even the joke prospect of President Trump kind of scary - this is a guy that can literally have or do just about anything he wants except kill people. Ergo, one trembles in fear at the implicit drive behind his seeking higher office.

let's not forget, please, that Trump (like Palin before him) is admired as a prez candidate by a small percentage of the population.

shameless shithead is nicely alliterative

liberals like to wring their hands over them, in other words

Who the fuck really thinks Trump has a shot, liberal or conservative? No one, I thought. Has there really been hand-wringing? Me, I'm just scared of dudes like him in general, who have everything but want more.

Trump could not buy the sort of attention that a president commands. His reality show only gets a few million sets of eyeballs, I am guessing under 10 million at least. As president he would be the center of the world's attention. Even as a "serious" candidate he would up his media attention by a factor of 10.

Of course, if he got in the White House, he'd be irresponsible in ways we can only fathom in our darkest imagination.

btw this is the same glitzy, incestuous party where David Gregory and Karl Rove did this routine, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYZre8kEsuw

i'm only about a quarter through this thing but it is great

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/08/power-struggle-inside-the_n_530247.html?view=print

Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party

a master class in all the dumb shit we argue about itt constantly

The most recognizable members of the progressive caucus, the ones who spend more time tending to their committees than organizing, were elected amid the collapse of trust in American institutions during the mid-1970s. Watergate Babies Henry Waxman, Charlie Rangel and George Miller took the House by its bull horns: They upended the seniority system in a historic revolt aimed at breaking the hold on power that Southern Democrats had in the House. But as the fall of Nixon gave way to the rise of Reagan, they were forced to spend more than a decade on the defensive. The most effective Democratic legislator during the period was, not coincidentally, Ted Kennedy, who was renowned for his fine-grained, dynamic understanding of the institution and, more importantly, the personal pressures facing each member. He was always on the offense, even with a Republican in the White House.

The battle to make policy on Capitol Hill changed in 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took back control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades. Legislating was no longer a priority. Undoing legislation was. And that didn't require intellectual infrastructure. Gingrich attacked the institution itself, wiping out funding for caucus staff, the intellectual infrastructure around which liberals in Congress organized. "It was a big blow," Miller says.

i mean, how can you not love writing like that.

this is from like a month ago btw!

ryan grim is great, huffpo has some terrific writers working

btw if you wanna get infuriated

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/29/fallout_from_videos_of_labor_course_at_university_of_missouri

I'm generally a fan of Sullivan, but this is too clever by half:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/about-last-night.html

Paragraph 1: Above the fray, seeing through the whole charade.
Paragraph 2: Gushing unabashedly.

(And paragraph 3's just weird--I thought she made a very public show of not attending. Is there a joke I'm missing?)

Can someone please explain the disconnect here? I'm not kidding--I don't get it.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/54018.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/04/white-house-correspondents-dinner-party-photos-201104#slide=1

I mean, what I don't get is that Politico would print the former without even alluding to the latter.

journalism!

is dead!

I won't click on a Politico link, but I glanced, dispiritedly, at the VF one a few hours ago: the usual marriage of journalism and sycophancy.

That vanity fair piece is... just the worst thing.

that's why I'm tired of all my liberal friends in the last 12 hours posting Obama clips. The time to applaud him isn't when he takes aim at dead enders like Donald Trump with no chance of getting the nomination -- it's when he does something unapologetically liberal.

^^ this. Are we really going to go overboard cheerleading him for this? "You know, he expanded warrantless wiretapping." "Yeah, but did you see how he went after Trump?!"

I thought Obama was fully justified in saying whatever he said about Trump, for obvious reasons. I think him being part of last night is, as things stand today, as much a part of his job description as fundraising or anything else. He can't not attend--you just can't do that. I don't think he's at his best reading scripted jokes, so I've refrained from the cheerleading.

But it's not our job as liberals to applaud him for providing facile Sunday morning talk show fodder for Cokie and Chris.

Look, if last night raised anyone's spirits, may the Lord of Hosts bless him. But I'm sure I'm not the only one whose Facebook updates, like, ALL DAY, were by Dems who've been silent on the White House's capitulations for months yet suddenly applaud the evisceration of...Donald Trump?

It's 2010 all over again. You're scared of Palin yet don't give a fuck about indefinite detention and extending the Bush tax cuts? Really?

i like jokes.

I love earned jokes, and Obama didn't earn them, especially when he capitulated by releasing his birth certificate for the second time.

I really have no idea how you expect him to handle events like last night. Re your comment this morning on a different thread, similar to the comment above: try to imagine the reaction if he had made jokes about Wall Street and indefinite detention--it's a non sequitur. I also don't know why you assume that to say Obama was funny for one night means you don't care about the other. (Or where you get "scared of Palin" from...to find her hypocrisy stunning is to be afraid of her?)

"Earned jokes"?

I don't care so much about him, clemenza -- I care about the constant YOU GO GIRL! I've read today.

a horribly unearned "joke"

(Or where you get "scared of Palin" from...to find her hypocrisy stunning is to be afraid of her?)

Do you really need me to repost ilxors' anxieties about her candidacy?

I never found Dane Cook funny until I found out about his extensive charity work and can-do attitude.

no intelligent person is "afraid" of Palin or Trump. altho yes tbf a presidency for either one would be 100000000x worse than Obama and you know it.

Human nature. If you like Obama--which, as inconceivable as it may be for you, is still true for some (many?) of us--and you see him get beaten up left and right every day (and yes, I understand that goes with the job), it shouldn't be surprising that you'd be happy to see him look good at an event like this. (If that's what you think--again, I'm much more indifferent to his performance last night than most.)

If ilxor's were anxious about Palin's candidacy at some point in time (and I really doubt that's true anymore), doesn't that speak well of them? They knew it would have assured Obama's re-election, so maybe the anxiety was for non-political reasons.

and you know neither one of which was never going to happen, even according to 2009 polls.

xpost

If ilxor's were anxious about Palin's candidacy at some point in time (and I really doubt that's true anymore), doesn't that speak well of them? They knew it would have assured Obama's re-election, so maybe the anxiety was for non-political reasons.

I can't even dissect how awful this reads, clemenza -- as if Obama's reelection was assumed, no questions asked.

i get where albert is coming from but shit idk man

it's like getting mad at how so many of your facebook friends linked to cee-lo's "fuck you" video instead of hyping x or y track

shit I'm more insulted by your misnomer

It's like getting mad at how so many of your facebook friends linked to cee-lo's "fuck you" video yet not criticizing how much St Elsewhere blew.

I can't even dissect how awful this reads, clemenza -- as if Obama's reelection was assumed, no questions asked.

What on earth are you talking about? If Palin had been the nominee, she would have lost. Which I think--I'll have to check this--means Obama would have won.

With all due respect, Alfred, you really are sounding like a humourless scold these days.

too much greenwald will do that to you

clemenza your last post is full of shit tho

not that you're BSing, but it's just a shit post

i think it's okay to be all "hey obama landed some zings, he has some good timing" but what alfred is talking about & you're defending IS pretty ridiculous & extrapolated out also kind of indefensible -- personally i just don't see the point in getting worked up over it