Pretty beat today, so I’ll be doing a lot of the old Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.
On Press the Meat, Fmr. House Majority Leader Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), now the head of FreedomWorks, an organizer of the gibbering gibbons at town hall meetings; Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), Member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Fmr. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), author of “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis”; & Rachel Maddow plus Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY); Bruce Josten, Executive Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce; and Gov. Bill Ritter (D-CO).
Faze the Nation has Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary, Former Sen. Chuck Hagel, Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, and Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian.
On Fux News Sunday, Weaselface Wallace has Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.; J. James Rohack, M.D., president of the American Medical Association, and John Rother, AARP executive vice president for policy and strategy. Plus the fuxheads of course.
At the Goebbels network Jake Tapper is in for George Snufalufagus, and hosts Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Arlen Specter, and Orrin Hatch. Plus a roundtable with Ed Gillespie, former White House Counselor to President Bush, Democratic strategist and ABC contributor Donna Brazile, Ron Brownstein of the National Journal and the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut.
At CNN Fareed Zakaria ha the first television interview with Michael Oren as Israel’s new Ambassador to the United States, and the Prime Minister of Kenya.
OK, back to the kitchen.
Yes, but it will also have Rachel Maddow.
Meanwhile, stop over at my place and enjoy Good Morning Geniuses: The Collected Verse of Marc Maron. If he decides to do this project instead, I want a cut.
Good morning Jill, good morning all.
Rachel effectively provided a prophylactic to the Dick Armey.
Dick looked uncomfortably red this morning.
…the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube?
snip
The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.
snip
n the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”
When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America’s nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles — instead of long-range bombers — and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today’s tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: “Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I’m for hanging him!”
Before the “black helicopters” of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a “civil rights movement” had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would “enslave” whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn’t lack for subversives — anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and ’50s.
snip
The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/14/AR2009081401495_2.html?hpid=opinionsbox1&sub=AR&sid=ST2009081402964