Sadly, No!

Above: The President of the United States of America, at left

Bush Declares Cold War Over

“It ended,” Bush said in his stop at this former Soviet satellite. “The people of the Czech Republic don’t have to choose between being a friend of the United States or a friend with Russia. You can be both. We don’t believe in a zero-sum world.”

[…]

“My message will be Vladimir, I call him Vladimir, you shouldn’t fear a missile defense system,” Bush said. “As a matter of fact, why don’t you cooperate with us on a missile defense system.”

That’s what you get when you elect a cokehead president: a bunch of grandiose gibberish, name-dropping, and poorly conceived collaborative efforts (e.g., missile defense systems and/or sex with your wife).

Gavin adds: The best comment so far has been Putin’s. “It’s a defense against something which does not exist,” he said. “It would be funny if it was not so sad.”

Six-Meat Buffet is aiming to get bigger:

Death of A House Negro

First Hogzilla II, now this?

Not to convert this place into the Dead Meat Buffet but an enormous amount of meat died this weekend and we’re all the better for it. It goes without saying that the term “house negroâ€? gets bandied about with great frequency against anyone of seemingly African descent when they are on the Right. Be you Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice, Michael Steele, or J.C. Watts, you can expect a Harry Belafonte, a Danny Glover, or yes – even a Steve Gilliard to call you out for being the race traitor that you are. The sell-out, Oreo cookies who do Whitey’s bidding and put a black face on racist policies that would otherwise be rightly called out for what they are. Uncle Thomas and Aunt Thomasinas alike.

But really, who is doing whose bidding in those situations? Can Howard Dean call Condoleeza his “do right answer mammy who be smart�? Can James Carville call out Clarence for collard greens?

Which brings us to today’s marquee morbidity. The tragic, untimely death of Donk House Negro and all around bigot Steve Gilliard. Who knew that boiling bacon grease in a spoon and mainlining it into the neck vein was bad for your health?

Yes, right, isn’t the Internet a wonderful forum for opinion? Yes, aha, mm, so.

Addressing the speakers:

1) Steve was a friend of ours in ways encompassing politics, but also beyond that. We knew Steve as well as anyone could know him digitally, from hanging out and talking and from recombinant debate-sessions about things, in which others came and went and argued. We swapped recipes and comforted each other in moments of trouble. We were sometimes a tight unit, I think in large part from having been similarly fiery characters in public, while similarly polite in private. Steve was a friend who, I was sometimes reminded by photos or by certain locutions or topics he employed, was black.

2) Who do you think you are?

2.1) Who the fuck do you think you are?

2.3) Who the fuck do you think you are?

2.5) What, out of the laughing white universe of Whitey McYuk-Yuk, legacy-conservative, Reagan-worshipping, Huey-Lewis-fan, Chemise-Lacoste, provincial-college, 25-year-old debate-team FUCKERY is this?

3.0) You people (and I say the phrase, ‘you people,’ with a historical certainty inculcated with irony) like to believe that we’re ‘hippies.’ In fact, what we are is the grinning rebellio-conservative’s worst nightmare: niggers with a badge. I.e., in our case, teh misfits and punk rockers from high school, but with advanced degrees and experience, with expert friends and historical context. Other nigger mileage differs, but the average is constant.

3.5) I said ‘nigger.’ We don’t even hasten to say, anymore, that we don’t care about wordage, the cod-linguistics, the careful diction which has caused so many people so much sad-violin trouble in the past. We know what words mean, and we use the words we mean to use. You’re afraid to say ‘nigger,’ so we’ll say it. And then we’ll say this:

4.0) Who the fuck do you think you are?

4.5) We await with great neglect anything that you might say to dig yourself out of this ditch that you’ve so alacritously helped dig for the conservative movement, so-called. We have sympathy in a way, only not toward yourselves as people.

5.0) We will bury you.

* Johnny Rebel, a.k.a. Clifford J. Trahan, ‘Who Likes A Nigger,’ 1965, Reb Rebel Records

Out on the campaign trail, John Fund keeps his bullshit detector holstered:

Mr. Thompson said the next president should have the courage to talk straight with the American people and bluntly say that Americans will have to confront both the soaring cost of entitlements and the need to remain committed in the war on terror, even when Iraq is “in the rear-view mirror.”

Colloquially, I believe the expression is, “Don’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.”

Assuming it even were possible to forget about The Dickification of the Western Female, Rush Limbaugh and friends remind us:

CALLER:  Let me tell you what it is. They got a couple on there, husband and wife, and they’re talking to a specialist, this woman, and every time the woman suggests something, the husband says, “It’s too hard. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. It’s too hard,” and the woman specialist says, “Oh, you can do it.”  So finally at the end, the husband gives in, and says, “Honey, you were right. I was wrong.”  I was thinking, you know, this commercial’s really emasculating. I feel like all these shows and these commercials are out to make men look like boobs!

I’m not a pussy, the commercial made me a pussy.

RUSH:  The guy is made out to be a total buffoon, which is not uncommon in television advertising.  Men have been buffoons, especially in beer commercials.  If I see one more can of beer hit a guy in the groin, I mean, it’s not even funny anymore. 

Beer can in the groin may not be funny anymore, but what about Football in the Groin? We thought the same thing when Kim Du Toit’s “essay” first appeared: WTF kind of man spends his time calling a radio show to complain about TV commercials that cause him to feel emasculated? JFC, go buy a power tool and do power tool stuff. Fortunately, Rush has picked up his caller’s emasculation and is running with it:

We mentioned the Brawny man. I said the last manly guy in advertising was Mr. Clean, as I said the Brawny man. Back in the seventies the icon for the Brawny man was a Paul Bunyan type, rough shaven, dark haired, plaid shirt. When did this happen? Early 2000s, they decided at this company, Brawny paper towels, they decided to change the icon and turn the guy into a metrosexual.

Yes — there’s no better proof of the feminization of American culture than a company’s decision to replace a “super cheesy” fellow from the 70s with a lumberjack — and that’s because: 

Glenn has a go at the wingnut weasels:

What is going on here, quite transparently, is not any assertion by conservatives of their alleged “principles,” but rather a craven rehabilitation project. Bush’s presidency cannot be salvaged, but the reputation of conservatives and conservatism can be — but only by separating the former from the latter.

During the years of 2002 through 2004, George Bush was venerated like few other Presidents, spoken of in terms so reverent that at times it seemed almost improper to criticize him. And it was American conservatives leading these virtual canonization rituals.

Such sudden “recognition” that Bush is not a true conservative is transparently prompted by the collapse of the Bush presidency[.]

So many wingnuts are trying to salvage their loathesome ideology from Bush’s abject failure; he’s gone over the cliff and they are just hanging on, trying to get a grip so that they don’t fall with him. All they can claw at in this endeavor is the position that Bush has betrayed conservatism, is not a conservative, conservatism is not responsible for Bush, conservatism is actually viable and popular and should not suffer unduly for Bush’s incompetence.

Don’t let ’em do it! Kick them off the edge! Smash their fingers! And Glenn does just that, quoting these wingnut pundits’ servile comments when Bush was popular, all of them saying in effect that Bush was a paragon of conservatism. But now that his numbers are in the tank, the weasels are trying to revise their own history. “Suddenly” Bush is not a conservative. Glenn singles out Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Robert Novak, Doughy Pantload.

Well, Sadly, No!’s specialty is extreme wingnuttery. And what’s more extreme than weaselly revisionist history? What’s worse than ‘suddenly’ discovering that Bush is ‘no longer’ a conservative? Ahh, that would be the claim that Bush was never a conservative, was a rank-rodent, liberal-in-disguise all along! I present, ladies and gentlemen, Mark Steyn:

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Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide

The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations — creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

Of course they did:

I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue. The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party and domestic politics and secondly, I just don’t think that China is particularly useful to think of as an enemy comparable to the former Soviet Union. So in that sense, September the 11th was a big godsend because we were attacked and didn’t have to invent an enemy at that point. But I think that, just that general tendency to think of the world as extremely dangerous and full of big threats is something they try to carry forward.

Mark shows why he’s still the high pimp of the wingnut game:

But whatever we do, we will have to make certain it happens, because if we don’t, it won’t. Period.

I can only give my sincere salute.

DeLong:

This is spot on to an extent- it seems that to win the Republican nomination, candidates are simply trying to out-crazy and out-stupid each other in order to appeal to people like Ace. The question is, will this strategy work again in a general election, as it did in 2004? Because if it does, well, we’re a deeply stupid and crazy nation.

The Deciderer

Apparently he’s frightened of Dick Cheney or something.

-Atrios 09:44

Huh? Ohhh:

Cheney challenges Rice on multiple fronts.

“A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney’s national-security team has been actively challenging Rice’s Iran strategy in recent months. … Officials from the veep’s office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official.� But it’s not just Iran[.]

Well, yeah.

I think this is where personality matters as much as ideology. Dear Leader knows he’s toast. He’s kind of lost, nursing his resentment, wallowing in self-pity, sulking around the White House and muttering that History will vindicate him. Richard Cheney, on the other hand, has the mentality of a suicide bomber: he knows he’s toast, too, but by God as long as he’s able, he’s going to pursue his violent obsessions; for war’s sake, Dick Cheney will spit his last political breath at thee. Richard Cheney is no Nixonesque crack-up; he’s not paralyzed by unpopularity at all, just mindful of the countdown to 1-20-09 and trying to create as much damage as possible until then. Bush is too demoralized and depressed to exert the force majeure necessary to back up Condi and overrule Dick. But then again Dick will not be overruled by anyone. And besides, Dear Leader is content to chew on (or, rather, chew-up) Iraq, where Dick Cheney has always seen the Middle East as a smorgasbord of goodies.

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ROGER CLEMENS HAS HURT HIS GROIN, AND HE’S NOT COMIN’ BACK! OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS!! OF ALL THE DRAMATIC WASTES OF MONEY I’VE EVER SEEN, ROGER CLEMENS PULLING HIS GROIN AND ANNOUNCING THAT HE’S NOT BACK!!!

Shorter Roger Clemens: