Your FerengiMedia At Work, Holiday Edition

All you need to know about the very, very serious White House Press Corps:

 

Merry Christmas, everybody…

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#Hoekstroika Is Dead – UPDATED!

And here’s what killed it:

You can put our wingnuts up against anybody’s, anytime, anywhere.  On the other hand, if he was seeking attention (what, that guy?  Surely NOT!), he got it. Nice job, doofus.

UPDATE: The obligatory “Shut up you fool!” entreaty from on high is nigh:

N.C. Republican Party Chairman Claude Pope said Monday that Sen. Bob Rucho should apologize for a tweet that compared the Affordable Care Act with Nazis and terrorists.

“The tweet is highly offensive and he should apologize,” Pope said in a statement Monday.

On Sunday, Rucho tweeted, “Justice Robert’s pen & Obamacare has done more damage to the USA then the swords of the Nazis, Soviets & terrorists combined.”

The tweet created a firestorm online and in the Twitter-verse. Rucho, reached Monday, was unrepentant.

“I have no need to respond to Claude Pope because I don’t owe him and he doesn’t owe me,” said the Matthews Republican.

“What I stand on is the truth. The bottom line is I still believe fully that the negative impact on the finances of North Carolina and its people is going to be significantly impacted even in comparison to any of those wars that occurred. … People need to open their eyes. This is a serious problem.”

Rucho, who co-chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said the tweet was referring to the cost of American conflicts, but called the program known as Obamacare a “socialist” system like that of the old Soviet Union.

Is anyone really surprised that Rucho countered with the KFC maneuver (AKA the Double Down)? C’mon, it wouldn’t have been authentic wingnut gibberish if he hadn’t!  Rock on, blockhead…

I’m Mad As Hell

She said it so much better than I ever could have – the anger these wastes of protoplasm induce in me leaves me unfit to write.

Southern Beale

Truly nothing shows how completely useless our news media has become than the endless discussion of the “Obama-Castro handshake.” This is Volume Two of the “Obama Bowed To Saudis” fauxtrage, another fabricated reaction to a completely meaningless incident. The Daily Show has already superbly skewered those pretending to be upset about this so I don’t need to go into all the times Republicans shook hands with horrible people. Suffice it to say, it’s just more manufactured outrage expressing the belief of the 27% that President Obama does not belong in the White House. How typical.

If the national news media hasn’t yet figured out that there’s nothing this president can do that won’t result in endless hand-wringing from the right wing over how the blackety-black Muslim usurper has destroyed American prestige and sullied the very institution of the American Presidency with his blackety blackness, then I really have no…

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Mandela and the Right’s Mindwipe

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful dissembling of the right’s selective memory regarding the late Nelson Mandela is truly awe-inspiring:

For many years, a large swath of this country failed Nelson Mandela, failed its own alleged morality, and failed the majority of people living in South Africa. We have some experience with this. Still, it’s easy to forget William F. Buckley—intellectual founder of the modern right—effectively worked as a press agent for apartheid:

Buckley was actively courted by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Taiwan, Franco’s Spain, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal’s African colonies, and went on expenses-paid trips trips to some of these countries.

When he returned from Mozambique in 1962, Buckley wrote a column describing the backwardness of the African population over which Portugal ruled, “The more serene element in Africa tends to believe that rampant African nationalism is self-discrediting, and that therefore the time is bound to come when America, and the West … will depart from our dogmatic anti-Colonialism and realize what is the nature of the beast.”

In the fall of 1962, during a visit to South Africa, arranged by the Information Ministry, Buckley wrote that South African apartheid “has evolved into a serious program designed to cope with a melodramatic dilemma on whose solution hangs, quite literally, the question of life or death for the white man in South Africa.”

Buckley’s racket as an American paid propagandist for white supremacy would be repeated over the years in conservative circles. As Sam Kleiner demonstrates in Foreign Policy, apartheid would ultimately draw some of America’s most celebrated conservatives into its orbit. The roster includes Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jesse Helms, and Senator Jeff Flake. Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a “phony” and led a “reinvestment” campaign during the 1980s. At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, “I know we don’t like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don’t have it all that bad.”

Not all prominent conservatives were so dishonorable. When Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions of South Africa, Mitch McConnell, for instance, was forthright—”I think he is wrong … We have waited long enough for him to come on board.” When Falwell embarrassed himself by condemning Tutu, some Republican senators denounced him.

But the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa’s white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage. When you see a Tea Party protestor waving the flag of slavery in front of the home of the first black president, understand that this instinct has been cultivated.

The more things change, the more they stay the same – especially when there’s a brown to put down:

It is still, at this very hour, being cultivated: 

He won the country’s first free presidential elections in 1994 and worked to unite a scarred and anxious nation. He opened up the economy to the world, and a black middle class came to life. After a single term, he voluntarily left power at the height of his popularity. Most African rulers didn’t do that, but Mandela said, “I don’t want a country like ours to be led by an octogenarian. I must step down while there are one or two people who admire me.”

That is the Wall Street Journal, offering a shameful, condescending “tribute” to one of the great figures of our time. Understand the racism here. It is certainly true that “most African rulers” do not willingly hand over power. That is because most human leaders do not hand over power. What racism does is take a basic human tendency and make it it the property of ancestry. As though Franco never happened. As though Hitler and Stalin never happened. As though Pinochet never happened. As though we did not prop up Mobutu. As though South Carolina was not, for most of its history, ruled by Big Men as nefarious and vicious as any “African ruler.”

To not see this requires a special disposition, a special blindness, a special shamelessness, a special idiocy.

Well said, TNC.