Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

In which Subcommander Markos explains to Harold Ford why selling out your friends, disavowing your passions and principles, and hiding out under the skirts of the very people who are bent on destroying you is actually not a brilliant political strategy.

On “Face the Nation”

Huckabee (on the meaningless Iowa Straw Poll): Fishes and loaves, bitches! Some of the money other people spent on this thing was nuts. I came in second for around 100K!

Yes, Mike. Yes you did.



On “Meet the Press”

David Gregory tags in for Punkin Haid Russert, and Markos rocks, deconstructs and reformats Harold Ford's world.

Ford: Oh now let’s not get all caught up in who helped who win, and who was more responsible for victory than whom.

Because among other things, spending five minutes doing that – spending five minutes just comparing Netroots power and Howard Dean’s fight ‘em everywhere 50-State-Stategy…with the DLC 18-State, Sell-Out-Democratic-Principles and HALO-in-DLC-consultants-and-bales-of-money Strategy -- would be mighty fucking embarrassing.

Markos: We have had 20 years of failure using the DLC Republican-lite formulations. We have been suckered into buying the “conventional wisdom” pushed by pundits and consultants that this is a Conservative country. But we aren’t, and we have been losing elections over and over again because of this shitty advice that we need to hide our passions and be ashamed of who we are.

Markos: Bill Clinton – the greatest pure politician in the last 40 years – could not win a 50-plus-1 majority running as a DLC-type. But running as Proud Democrats, we ran at 56% in 2006.

Ford: But Dubya…?

Markos: Dubya gave us an opening. But Harold, if the only reason we won in 2006 was George W. Bush’s fuckuppery, then you would be Senator Ford today.

Gregory: But what do you think… What do you believe… What about the differences of opinion over how to get out of Iraq…

Markos: This isn’t about me. We want our candidates to run as Proud Democrats.

Ford: I am a Proud Democrats!

Markos: Well then will you please stop going on Fox teevee, calling fellow Democrats crazy and bashing Harry Reid?

Harold Ford, Proud Democrat, then falls back on pure DLC reflex -- Channeling wingnut talking points (in this case, Bill O’Reilly) to attack their “friends” : Well, well…your site has terrible stuff on it. Anti-Semitic stuff. And that horrible, horrible Cindy Sheehan is lurking in there somewhere too.

Markos: It’s called “democracy”. This isn’t about me. My site has hundreds of thousands of people on it. Some say stupid things. I don’t control their voices. But you run the DLC, and it has only a dozen voices. You can control what they and you do. So quit being ashamed of being a fucking Democrat and quit giving free political reachrounds to wingnuts.

Ford promises to go to Yearly Kos next year.

Ford also clearly doesn’t understand this kind of combat, or what it was that just hit him.

And then an utterly meaningless political roundtable studded with meaningless questions and opines from various Big Wallet Pundits about the virtually meaningless Iowa Straw Poll.

Surprising that, given the level of trivia-sifting, no one asked Byron York why he let some Delilah shear his flowing tresses. Or how much he paid for it.

So completely devoid of content, except for this…

Gregory: But what about this base-pandering that the candidates are doing

Margaret Carlson: Well if you look at these issues -- Labor and the Human Rights issues -- these sound a lot more like Centrist issues. Middle Americans are the people who have lost pensions and health care. (And now, their homes.) And they are bewildered.


On “Fox News Sunday”

Chris Wallace interviews Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann Romney on the price of straw in Iowa.

Apparently, it ain’t hay: winning the meaningless Iowa Straw Poll cost Romney $800 buck-per-vote.

Mitt: If you can’t compete in Iowa in August, how can your compete anywhere, ever?

Wallace: Isn’t Fred "None of the Above" Thompson more Conservative than thou.

Mitt: I will be the CEO-in-chief.

Wallace: What about the flip-floppery?

Shows video of Mitt saying over and over again that he was and is pro-choice.

Mitt: I’m pro-life. Just like Reagan. And Henry Hyde. Maybe Jebus even! Sure I was wrong eleven minutes ago, but I’m right now.

Wallace: Do you really think you could ever have been elected as governor of Massachusetts of you had not been pro-choice.

Mitt: You can’t predict that.

Well, yeah, that’s true.

You can’t predict the past.

Because, y’know, it’s the past.

Mitt: I wasn’t pro-choice. I never used the words pro-choice.

Well here’s a little video of Romney running for office...100 years ago ,
40 years ago,
20 youthfully indiscreet ago,
10 years ago

....in 2002.

In it, he says he will protect a woman’s right to choose.

He will defend the right to choose.

He will support the right to choose.

That his Mother was proudly pro-choice and that he was proud of her.


We replay. You decide.




So his position is… he will continue to support and defend a woman’s right to choose, but will not say the words “pro-choice” out loud, because those are Scary, Liberal Words that make Sweet Baby Jebus cry.

Which is why Romney really is the perfect Conservative Candidate.

Because the Bush Regime Dead Enders really do share the superstitious, Dark Ages belief words have some primal, conjuration power to either deflect Reality or summon demons.

Because as a group they really are simply too stupid to comprehend the difference between Symbol and Object.

They really did believe Saddam = bin Laden...for no other reason than because Dubya repeated it a million times. And they have cheerfully let thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis suffer and die for that particular delusion.

They really don’t believe in Global Warming and do believe the Earth is 10,000 years old, because it says so in their Golden Book of Bronze Age Fables.

They really do not grasp the distinction between the legal and philosophical operating system of United States called the Constitution, and the representation object of the United States called the Flag.

(And they certainly do not see the grotesque irony in their hysterical calls to amend the Constitution -- a document they loath and are perfectly happy to see defiled by their Dear Leader every day of the week -- in order to further curtail any Free Speech that makes them feel icky, and protect the Flag against a wholly imaginary plague of dirty, Zippo-brandishing hippies.)

And so why wouldn’t the Christalopithecans be induced to see and ferociously defend some crucial, mystical difference between being pro-choice and saying “pro-choice” that eludes the not-stupids?

Then, Got Surge?

Mitt: There are some signs that things are surgingly good. But it’s too complicated for me to explain. Just look deep into my hair and feel good about Murrica...

Wallace: What about Boosh?

Mitt: We’re different people, of course. (Yes, Mitt, you don’t occupy the same point in space and time as Dubya. I will grant you that.) I respect him greatly. But I’ll bring in competent people. From the Private Sector.

Mitt: No socialized medicine for the Mittster. I want a Good Old-Fashioned Corporate Medicine that encourages the poor and the middle class to save more so they can turn over their pennies and food money to Pharma and Health Care, who will, in turn, charge the sick and the debilitated whatever the fuck they want to.

Wallace: What about strapping ol’ Seamus to the car?

Mitt: I love my dog. He loved his ride.

Wallace: You know its illegal, right? Cruel and unusual treatment of an animal, and illegal?

Mitt: It was illegal? I didn’t know that. I’m pro-life. I love my dog. He loved his ride.

Next up, Ann Romney to talk about, presumably, her “respectable Republican cloth coat”.

So a slab ofs pace-age polymer hair, expensive blue cloth, and t-square body angles bolted over a calculating vacuum who cannot keep his lies straight from one campaign stop to the next?

Jesus, if Mitt didn't exist (and the science on that score is hardly conclusive), the GOP would have had to invent him out of the reanimated remains of Reagan’s old wardrobe and hair care products.

On “This Week”

Brownback (on Iowa): The country trusts Iowa. They think about stuff!

Brownback (on the Iowa Thunderdome): Ten Men Enter. Three Men Leave.

Good thing they didn’t shoot bullets of fire…

Would’ve been a really been dangerous thing to do in such close qarters with all those up all the straw men, straw polls.


Stephanopoulos: Doug Lute says it makes sense to consider a draft. Has always been in the table. What do you think?

Brownback: We don’t need no stinkin’ draft. We need a political solution in Iraq. I think General Petraeus will say we made great military progress, but that there hasn’t been one fucking inch of political progress.

Stephanopoulos: Will you keep supporting the surge if there is no progress?

Brownback: I’d send James Baker there right now to “knock this thing out”. Then I’d withhold sex from the Iraqi government until they get their shit together. A President Brownback would run a strictly “No consensus/No yum-yum!” Administration.


Then, Go, Dennis, Go!


Stephanopoulos: The people love you, but you’re not getting any love. Wuzzup?

Kucinich: Its still early.

Stephanopoulos: What about the Centrists? The DLC? All of my Clinton Administration pals! Aren’t your ideas about being pro-worker, pro-middle-class, pro-sane-foreign-policy just Crazy-Assed Socialism!

Kucinich: The Center has shifted. I am the Center, and the DLC agenda is indistinguishable from the NeoCon agenda. They reject what every other industrial democracy has: a not-for-profit health care system. They reject a sane foreign policy.

Kucinich: Our occupation of Iraq is fueling the insurgency. We are in Iraq because of a failed foreign policy doctrine. I’m going to follow the spirit of John F. Kennedy. I say we meet the world with strength and confidence.

Kucinich: I would do away with the policy of mutually assured destruction. It is essentially insane. We will work to abolish nuclear weapons.

Kucinich: I would not do it unilaterally, but I would lead a multi-lateral effort to get rid of nuclear weapons.

On NAFTA, Iraq, Anti-terrorism, Dennis was good, good, and very good.

We could do much worse than a President Kucinich.



On ”The Chris Matthews Show”

Rick Stengel: We are narcissists and we like candidates that smell like us.

Elisabeth Bumiller: Yes. We all hate ourselves.

Matthews: Boomers are obnoxious, self-indulgent, idiots who demand attention even though they have nothing to say.

And that is why you, Chris, are their boy-crushing, panty-sniffing, incoherent, rambling, talent-free-yet-richly-compensated King.

Matthews: It talking to hicks any way to pick a President?

Well of course.

I mean, they pass the most important Chris Matthews Trust Test, don’t they?

That manly and olfacterrific spoor of Old Spice and cow shit that screams Instant Credibility?

Unlike, one presumes, the scary urban people and white liberals boomers who use body spray and peppermint-flavored floss and are, according to the collective wisdom of Matthew’s panel, all obnoxious, self-indulgent idiots.