Day: 7/8/2014

Impeachment Fever: America Rejected Sarah Palin, Now She Rejects America

Posted by on July 8, 2014 at 5:16 pm. 5 Comments :

The “Quitta From Wasilla” is making headlines again by displaying symptoms of acute Obama Derangement Syndrome. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP nominee for Vice-President, who was soundly rejected by American voters, is now calling for the impeachment of President Obama (again), who was elected twice with significant majorities.

Sarah Palin

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Palin’s panicky challenge to the Psycho Chicken Littles she commands from the parapets of her Facebook page cites the standard menu of wingnut atrocities that Tea Party dimwits cling to so fiercely (i.e. fundamental transformation, American exceptionalism, etc.). What her unhinged freak-out failed to provide were any actual legal justifications for impeachment. You know…high crimes, misdemeanors, jaywalking, anything remotely deserving of removal from office. With a completely empty basket of goodies, Palin launched her tirade saying that …

“Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, ‘no mas.'”

That’s a nice touch. In that one opening sentence Palin likened President Obama to a wife beater with America as his victim; she pandered to the Latino immigrants she so often disparages by demonstrating her trifling command of the Spanish language, which she and her disciples insist must never be spoken within U.S. borders; and she lied about the President’s record on immigration, which has reduced unlawful entries and increased deportations.

From there Palin portrays the perilous journey of immigrants as a leisure trip wherein the brown hordes will “kick off their shoes and come on in.” It’s just like a big pool party in her view. But even worse, she completely fails to grasp the needs and desires of the American people by misrepresenting their priorities and the consequent duties of the President.

“There is no end in sight as our president prioritizes parties over doing the job he was hired by voters to do. Securing our borders is obviously fundamental here […] communities become unrecognizable and bankrupted due to Obama’s flood of illegal immigration.”

There is a bountiful cache of supid in that paragraph. First of all, what she calls “Obama’s flood of illegal immigration” was put in motion by George W. Bush’s signature on an anti-child trafficking bill in 2008, that requires the government to provide minor immigrants with legal representation and safe and secure housing while awaiting resolution of their status. And Palin did not, and can not, cite an example of a community that is unrecognizable, save for the one she can see from her house in Alaska.

More to the point, Palin’s assertion that immigration is job one for the President ignores the fact that most polls on the priorities of the American people actually put jobs as job one (20%). Immigration, while a serious matter that needs to be addressed, is not particularly high on the list of things Americans want their government to work on. In fact it is often near the bottom of that list (3%).

It is pathetic that people like Palin are making monsters out of children who find themselves in an untenable position. They are alone and frightened by the prospect of being returned to countries where they live in danger and poverty. And now they are further terrorized by insensitive Americans who scream at them and threaten them and put up barricades to prevent them from reaching safe harbor. It’s atrocious behavior that is embarrassing to the majority of Americans who reject such hatefulness.

Immigrant Kids

Palin concludes her rant with a generalized lashing out that offers no substance or reason – just hostility and spittle-inflected animus toward the man that America elected twice and summarily threw her in the political gutter.

“It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment. The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.”

Palin, like many of her comrades on the irrational right, have no idea what impeachment means or how it is invoked. She failed to provide even a single example of a valid impeachable offense, even though she says that there are many of them. And her hysterical overreach is in harmony with the conservative pseudo-patriots who are salivating at the prospect of winning a majority in the Senate this November so they can pursue their anti-democratic agenda and oust the man that they pledged, from the moment he was inaugurated, to destroy.

For this reason it is imperative that Democrats break out of their traditional mid-term complacency and actually get out and vote this year. If they don’t, they can expect with near certainty that Republicans will try to impeachment Obama. And with that will come all the attendant political soap operas and antagonisms that the nation really doesn’t need as there are numerous other issues to address without having to poison the atmosphere with a politically driven show trial. If after all this Democrats don’t vote in record numbers, they will wake up the day after the election with two year long migraine.

Congress Allocates More Money To Phony Benghazi Investigations Than To Veterans

Posted by on July 8, 2014 at 10:34 am. 2 Comments :

Two months ago GOP House Speaker John Boehner announced that he would concede to pressure from Fox News and the Tea Party by creating the House Select Committee On Politicizing Benghazi. He then packed the committee on the Republican side with rabidly partisan attack dogs, led by alpha dog Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.

Gowdy Doody

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Since that announcement there has been nothing of note to report. There are no scheduled hearings and no estimated timeline for the investigation. Count on it to drag out long enough for Republicans to exploit it during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The one bit of news that has just emerged is that the Speakers office has allocated $3.3 million to the committee for the current year. So after spending untold millions by four other partisan committees who, despite making wild predictions about White House malfeasance and cover ups, never found anything to support their manufactured accusations, they are now proposing to up the ante with no indication that the result will be any different.

To put the budgeting in perspective, the House Veterans Affairs Committee will only be receiving $3 million this year, even though they have more than twice as many members and a legitimate scandal to investigate with legitimate victims who continue to suffer. The Benghazi Circus will spend more in its first year than the Intelligence Committee which deals with numerous international matters that have far-reaching impact on national security.

The financial priority that is demonstrated by these budget choices is evidence that the Republican House is more obsessed with phony scandals and political sabotage than with actually solving real problems for the American people. The tragic events in Benghazi have always been merely a crude weapon for the rightist politicians and pundits who are fixated on destroying all things Obama. And the new committee is just another means of achieving political goals that they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box. This was illustrated with certainty when back in May of 2013, Fox News aired a tribute to their chief, CEO Roger Ailes, for his efforts as “The Driving Force” in “Keeping Benghazi Alive.”

Fox News Ailes Benghazi

This was one of the most brazen admissions of the abandonment of journalistic ethics ever broadcast. The arrogance they display with on-air graphics confessing that they “made terror attack a story” in response to a “push” by their CEO, is unprecedented. Credible news organizations do not permit executives to interfere with editorial decisions. But the operative word there is “credible,” which has never applied to Fox News.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Tweets That Are Not By The President Are Not By The President

Posted by on July 8, 2014 at 3:51 am. 3 Comments :

It takes a remarkably obstinate personality to insist on a position even after acknowledging that the position is false. But that’s precisely what the editors at Fox Nation did when they reported on an exchange between Jonathan Karl of ABC News and Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary.

Fox Nation vs. Reality

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At yesterday’s daily press briefing, Karl sought to determine whether President Obama was responsible for, or aware of, a tweet that was posted by Organizing for America [OFA], a political enterprise that was spun off of the Obama campaign for the presidency. In his preface to the question he appeared to already know the answer, but persisted with his contrived query anyway.

Karl: The President’s tweets – those tweets that go out @BarackObama – I understand those that aren’t signed “BO” aren’t directly written by him. Does he even read the others, does he know they’re going out? Are they reviewed by senior people at the White House or is that just simply OFA doing something on his behalf?
Earnest: The @BarackObama Twitter handle is maintained by OFA. That is the political organization that was the offshoot of the campaign, and that is a Twitter handle that is maintained independent of the White House.

That’s about as clear as it can be said. OFA is an independent operation that is not run through the White House. Neither the President, nor his staff, is responsible for what it posts, unless explicitly signed by the President. Yet somehow the editors at Fox Nation plastered a headline atop this story that falsely states “White House Not Sure If Obama Aware of His Own Tweets.”

The severity of the cognitive disconnect here is magnified by the fact that the video they themselves attached to the story contradicts their own headline. So how can they post a video that declares in absolute terms that these are not the President’s tweets, and still call them his tweets in bold type? Simple. They’re shameless liars. What’s more, the source for the story is the disreputable, GOP-run, Koch brothers affiliated, phony news service, the Washington Free Beacon. They are a brazenly biased organization for whom spreading lies is an integral part of their mission. With deception and disinformation being such an important facet of these operations, you would think that they would be better at it.

The article went on to further discuss the content of the tweet despite having already established that the President had nothing to do with it. In the process, the White House was able to reinforce their position in opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hobby Lobby case that elevated the rights of a corporation’s religious beliefs over those of the human beings who work for the corporation.

Karl: The tweet I’m gonna ask you about is after the Hobby Lobby decision, it’s a “Throwback Thursday” tweet: “Throwback to last week when a woman—not her boss—made her own decisions about her health care.” Does the president believe that because of the Hobby Lobby decision, women are not allowed to make their own decisions about their health care unless they consult with their boss?
Earnest: That is certainly true of women in some cases, and that’s the concern that this administration has. That the consequence of the Supreme Court ruling is that it will allow bosses to interfere with what the President believes should be the freedom any woman has to make her own decisions about her health care.

While Earnest handily disposed of the clumsy and argumentative question by a reporter who has repeatedly demonstrated his political prejudices, the truly pathetic part of this is the manner in which it was framed by the Fox Nationalists and their pals at the Free Beacon. These folks should try to comprehend the stories they cover before making fools of themselves by authoring articles that are contradicted by the story’s content.