Off the Bullshit Scale

This is possibly the dumbest thing to appear on the NY Times editorial page in some time, which is a real accomplishment considering they run David Brooks twice a week.

14 thoughts on “Off the Bullshit Scale

  1. This assclown has been like a GOP Gunga Din – one of their greatest water-carriers of all time.

    Also too: He seems to either not know, or ignore, that that notorious Socialist, Richard M. Nixon, also proposed a national health care program.
    That would be while the Clintons were still in college or grad school, and Obama was in grade school.

    I can understand an Op-ed like this in the WSJ. Their editorial pages makes sewer workers retch.
    But the NY Times? C’mon!!!

  2. “…agreeing with my hunch that suddenly poll-obsessed marginal candidates might be tempted to say and do crazy things to get that critical bump in name ID or support.”

    And the GOP Crazy-feedback-Loop” will keep getting crazier – the echo’s echo will have echo’s!

    Where’s Rudy when you need him?
    If Carley doesn’t make the cut, Rudy would gladly cross-dress!
    http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=rudy+giuliani+in+a+dress&FORM=VIRE3#view=detail&mid=3F2B8AED94F0029499403F2B8AED94F002949940

    If that doesn’t haunt you at night, then nothing will!!!

  3. I enjoyed reading the comments far more than Mr. Wehner’s* piece. My favorite comment came from Ed: “It says something that Rick Santorum is another fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.”

    *So is it pronounced “Whiner,” “Wiener,” or “Way-wrong”?

  4. “… served in the last three Republican administrations…”

    That’s all you need to know about the author to understand why he’s completely off his rocker.

  5. One other thing: To this clown, I guess the TPP is the greatest example of wealth redistribution that would make Karl Marx blush.

  6. Dumb in the sense that it says something a person of common intelligence should reject after study of the evidence, yes.

    But someone praised the cunning of Jeb Bush for saying that “They don’t want us to have a discussion” about global warming. Because in a sense, the response “he’s not paying attention to science!” will allow him to say “See? didn’t I say they won’t let us even discuss it?”

    This is the same sort of thing: it don’t need it to be based in fact, it just needs to be impressive sounding enough to allow the claim that “both sides do it.”

    That said: to judge from the Gingrich Congress… well. Let’s remember that Gingrich is the guy who taught Republicans to call their proposals (for example) “pro-family” and Democrat(ic) proposals “anti-family” regardless of the content of the proposals. He had others pro/anti- pairings – not just family. But you get the point. Gingrich set in motion a situation in which stronger partisanship would be required, just to maintain the status quo. Had his Republican Revolution failed… but it didn’t.

  7. OT, but…

    Whoo-HOO! It’s now official! The Nebraska legislature overrode our governor, Voldemort Junior’s, veto of the death-penalty repeal. No more executions in Nebraska.

    Today we are all Cornhuskers.

  8. I can only assume this is some sort of trial balloon, to see the reaction before it becomes a standard talking point within the R party. He abandons seriousness early, by talking about sentencing reform..wait, does that make Rand Paul a liberal extremist too?

  9. Wehner is not only a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, but I think he also holds an honorary doctorate degree from Prager University.

  10. Looks like Santorum is now trying to get squeezed into the GOP clown car. Seems he’s dropped the loving the Lord and arbiter of morality shtick to become a foreign policy expert specializing in ISIS.

  11. John Chait does a massive take down on the article. I think one of the points he misses is when comparing Clinton to Obama, supposedly Obama is much more liberal. But so is the rest of the Democratic Party. One of the reasons, ok, the reason many of us Dems aren’t thrilled with a Hillary presidency is because we’re afraid it’ll be a return to Bill Clinton politics. Especially if she has to work with a republican congress, which is likely. Bill and Hillary are from the Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, which is to say, RINOs.

  12. A long the line of what LongHairedWeirdo wrote it just has to be impressive enough to give the target demographic an excuse to continue following their personal biases and a few “stats” and quotes to help them pose as someone who might have given it some thought. I like the term “smartisms,” but, I didn’t make it up.

    The phenomenon that the author is disguising, is “regression towards the mean.” He uses Clinton, who is sometimes described in Europe as the “best Republican president that the U.S. has ever had,” to represent the norm. When succeeding samples approximate the true norm more closely, by moving to the left, he reverses the norm and the outlier. This allows him to compare them in a light favorable to his intentions.

    He hasn’t convinced any of us, but that isn’t what he was trying to do.

  13. My apologies for the errors in my previous comment. I am traveling and a little out of practice with this little Mobil device.

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