Definition of Batshit Crazy Wingnuts

What you are about to see is a video of Congressional Rep. Jean Schmidt, Republican from Ohio, when she (as Fox News and CNN did) initially thought that the individual mandate on the Affordable Care Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. Hold on to your seats.

 

This is an elected representative acting like a spoiled child with Tourette Syndrome in public based on what she thought was a decision in favor of her ideology. I wish (and I hope someone has video out there) that we could have seen her reaction when she found out she was wrong. Did she run down the street tearing her hair out? Did she repeatedly slam her head against a wall? Did she self-immolate?

And she wasn't the only one. It seems that other Republican and conservative politicians, talking heads, pundits, bloggers and tweeters were apoplectic and hyperbole doesn't even begin to describe their reaction.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has vowed to "repeal Obamacare on Day One" of his presidency, as has Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Radio host Michael Savage blamed Chief Justice Roberts' decision on his epilepsy medication.

Rush Limbaugh claimed "a giant, total fraud was perpetrated on this country." I don't remember such a reaction to Citizens United.

Indiana  Congressman Mike Pence compared the expansion of health care coverage to millions of Americans to the biggest terrorist attack on American soil. Yes, 9/11. Seriously.

Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro likened the ruling to the Dred Scott decision. You know, the 1850s ruling that stated people of African descent were property whether or not they were slaves. And he ended his tweet (yes, he tweeted that) with "This is the end of America as we know it. No exaggeration." Nope. No exaggeration there!

And you have your usual, standard fare racist tweets; a self avowed Christian asking why they should pay for some "dumb nigger['s]" insurance, and one gem blaming "that nigger Coonance Thomas" for the Supreme Court's decision, even though Thomas was one of four who dissented. Classy.

This is what we find not only from fringe wingnuts, but actual mainstream and in some cases duly elected wingnuts. Is mental health covered under Obamacare?

Specter's Parting Shots

Just watch.

Fear The State, Fear It

posted by Armadillo Joe

Conservatives are authoritarians to the core. They worship state power when it is wielded by the right kind of people for purposes they endorse, like any good fascist, and their views have no place in a free and democratic society. They certainly should be kept as far away from the levers of power as possible.

And they most certainly shouldn't be allowed anywhere near something like a Supreme Court for so much as being in the audience to hear cases, much less in charge of it:

In 5-4 Decision, Conservative Supreme Court Denies DNA Evidence To Potentially Innocent Man

Because, it seems, it is more important to the greater public good and the integrity of our justice system for the machinery of law-enforcement to maintain an aire of infallibility (just like, oh say, a pope), rather than, um, justice. So, instead of reinforcing a general faith in the fairness of the system, our country's highest court has decided that a general fear of the power of the state to fuck-you-up-real-good-with-no-recourse is more important. Tasers and indefinite detention also help.

Thus, Chief Justice John "Hang 'Em High" Roberts and Samuel "Strip-Search Sammy" Alito both performed to the exact specifications their corporatist sponsors ordered up when they told the Cheney Administration who they wanted installed in the highest court in the land. And, as per usual, Justice Anthony "I'm the Joe Lieberman of the Supreme Court" Kennedy provided the crucial swing vote while the two-votes-for-the-price-of-one-brain duo of Antonin "I Never Met A Police State Tactic I Didn't Like" Scalia and Clarence "Pubic Hair" Thomas reliably brought up the rear.

What a collection of mentally-diseased reprobates and mean-spirited degenerates. We call this our "Supreme" Court?

We are well and truly fucked. Get ready for a whole lot of 5-4 votes in the next several years, even with Sotomayor (who may give us some 6-3 votes, frankly), because the empathy-free, iron-hard, coal-black and shriveled ugly heart of the Supreme court -- those four dependably authoritarian boneheads -- are an average age of 61, with Roberts clocking in at 54. The liberal wing is an average age of 76 and swapping Souter for Sotomayor will only bring it down to 72. The Court's right wing is generally younger and healthier and Obama will likely only be replacing liberal justices for the next few years, treading water until a member of The Court's Rethugli-bot goon squad either croaks or retires.

We don't live in a free country anymore, folks. In truth, unless you happened to be born rich, white, male, not openly homosexual and otherwise able to convincingly proclaim outwardly to be a good Protestant, this never has been a free country, but my point here is that we aren't even pretending anymore. This is the lasting damage of not only the Bush/Cheney era, but of the "conservative" revolution of the last 40+ years. The Supreme Court has always been The Prize to these people, ever since Brown v Board of Ed meant all the pretty little blonde girls would have to go to school with all those scary little black boys. The backlash from that decision gave rise to the upsurge which almost put Goldwater in the Oval Office, then led to Nixon, Reagan and both Bushes. Roberts and Alito during the second Bush term were the culmination of that decades-long march to hegemony. Bush may be gone, but The Movement got what it wanted in Roberts and Alito, and they are young, healthy guys able to make mischief for decades to come.

The Movement has spent decades and decades packing the lower courts with authoritarians and corporatists for the exact purpose of thwarting the public will on behalf of this country's true owners. We can win all the presidencies and take-over all the Congresses we want, but it will take a generation or two or even more to clean all that Rethugli-goon filth out of our judicial system, if we ever do.

In the meantime, just try not to get convicted of anything.

This is exactly right

posted by Armadillo Joe

I knew I'd find something to post. David Sirota gets this exactly right:

When [Demomcrats] temporarily took back the Senate in 2001 after Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords' party switch, they said the Republican House would stymie their priorities -- a logical argument that came true. When they won both houses of Congress in 2006, they said George W. Bush would veto their agenda -- again, a fair assertion that proved correct. When they won both Congress and the White House in 2008, they insisted they still couldn't do very much because their 58 Senate votes couldn't overcome a filibuster -- a less believable claim considering Obama's bully pulpit, but nonetheless at least mathematically valid.

It has been like watching a 15-year version of an Indiana Jones film -- every time we think the quest to find the ark will be completed, there's been another twist, putting off the promised conclusion just a little bit more.

I think there was a little quid pro quo here with regards to the timing of the Souter and Specter announcements, though I can't say for certain. Tristero over at Digby's Hullbaloo certainly thinks there are more things in the Washingtonian heaven and earth than are contained the mass media's philosophy:

Any questions now why Democrats are paying good money to run Specter as a Democrat?

I didn't think so.

Special note: Of course, I don't like Specter. Of course, I'm disgusted that the Democratic party has moved so far to the right that a conservative pinhead like Specter would even consider joining. Of course, I'm appalled at the manipulation and cynicism involved in purchasing Specter's votes for Obama's Supreme Court nominations.

But that is exactly what is going down. To ignore it, or to deny it, is not merely silly. It's naive. Dangerously naive: after all, there is a vicious, malicious, extreme-right Republican party that, given half a chance, will rear its ugly head up again and create even more havoc than they already have.

Now, it's time to get Franken seated. And fast.

Bye-bye, Mayberry Machiavellis. Welcome to politics, Chicago-style

I think the changes in the years since the GOP's heights of victory in 2002 have been epochal. Remember that Al Gore and John Kerry both almost won. Had either of them, we wouldn't now know the name of Barack Obama as anyone other than a slightly left-of-center senator from Illinois who coulda-shoulda-woulda make a run at the White House at some future date, maybe 2016. As it is, Bush's Rethugli-goons were in a multi-generational downward prior to 9/11 and they only really got one and a half election's worth of juice out of that melon. Rove's doubling-down of Nixon's Southern Strategy only made the GOP's long-term prospects more bleak in the face of large-scale demographic trends which anyone could foresee, as long as this country continued to have a functioning democracy (arguably, we don't) which is why he and his minions could crow about a Permanent Republican Majority -- which lasted about as long (proportionately speaking) as Hitler's Thousand Year Reich.

Nevertheless, after Reagan and his goon squad took this country over an ethical cliff, we finally hit bottom during the four-year stretch from 2002 and 2006, bumping and scraping along the seething, blood-caked boneyard on the floor of hell. I read somewhere on the interwebs these last few years (probably on Billmon before he went off the air) that though the GOP had truly taken over all three branches of government, two were relatively easily reversible, because the long-term damage done by these goons in our four-year march through perdition was actually in the judiciary. We could band together and fight to get the president we wanted, if we fought hard enough. We could fight our smaller local battles and get the legislatures we wanted both state and federal. We could fight for city councils and school boards and mayors, but the lasting damage, the Reich-wing moles planted throughout our government, the ringing echo of the Nixonland waking nightmare we've lived in since the late 60's will quietly march on in the form of appointed judges with secret agendas.

Which is why the GOP will go to the mat for Souter's seat. They will use every ounce of strength they have left, pull every trick, use every parlimentary sleight-of-hand, tell any lie, clutch their pearls and faint on any couch, bribe any official, level any threat, throw any tantrum. They may be (as Mr. C sez in his return post) the 21st Century Whig Party -- bound for oblivion -- but they all know that, collectively, this will be their last stand as a cohesive political entity. We have not yet even begun to see them bring Teh Crazy, no matter who Obama nominates, because they are so disorganized right now and their porcine, drug-addled sex-tourist demagogue of a leader is so convinced of his own potency, that no coordinated effort to keep their powder dry and regroup so as to live to fight another day is in the offing for this scattered mob on the run. They will go berserk on any name put forth by our president, because loading the judiciary with lifetime appointments has been the real goal of their reign of terror all long.

So this fight for Souter's seat, I think, is the looming Cosmic, Epic Battle Royale for the Ages for which the GOP has been itching. I wish it wasn't so early in Obama's term, but I think he has with this appointment and Specter's defection the power now, right now, to destroy utterly the last dregs of political power of the disorganized remnants of that corportized, violent, racist hard-right we've battled since the days of Nixon. They will never disppear completely, but their ability to regroup will be smashed beyond repair for two generations.

Thus, the fight right now is to prevent them from doing any further harm and that fight starts with Souter's seat. Damage would include a compromise candidate, by the way, because they will demand such. Then our fight will be to undo the deep, deep harm they've inflicted over the last 25 years, from Clarence Thomas forward, at all levels of the federal judiciary. On that score, if Souter's seat is the first step, impeaching Jay Bybee is the second step in a long, long chain of dispatching all those wicked, morally compromised men and women who are appointed for life and bringing our scales of justice back into some kind of balance.

The fact that Alito and Roberts are young terrifies me for exactly the same reason.

Breaking News...

guest-posted by Armadillo Joe

...Harry Reid discovers that water is wet:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took a moment Friday to lament Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert's tenure on the court so far, which in Reid's opinion has been far more conservative than expected. "He didn't tell us the truth," Reid's said

We bloggers out here in Left-Wing-Hippie-stan all tried to tell you fucking people that Roberts was a lying conservatard sack of shit who would smile as he slid the ideological knife between your ribs, tried to get you smug SOB's to stand and fight, fight, fight when that asshole came up for confirmation, tried to get you to do your fucking jobs as representatives of voters who believe that Rethugli-goon ideas about representative democracy amount to undermining it at every opportunity and oppose a guy who was young enough to distort court decisions to more nefarious ends for possibly two generations, tried to tell you. We tried to tell you, but then we're all just a bunch of bitter partisans with no real political power besides being able to vote in large numbers, which ain't nothin' unless some dollars are attached, I guess. We tried, but you people took the scorpions at their word, that they wouldn't sting you.

Jokes on you, eh? Or all of us.

Roberts Screwed The Oath Pooch Because He's A Stickler For Grammar

It seems that Chief Justice John Roberts is such a grammar stickler and a know-it-all, that he felt the instinctual need to grammatically correct a 220 year old oath specifically written in the Constitution because of a split-verb myth.

...How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

...In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.

Now he will be forever known as the Chief Justice that screwed up the Presidential Oath of Office. Heckuva job, Johnny.

Retake The Oath? Seriously? - UPDATED

After Chief Justice John Roberts royally fucked up what was probably the most important moment of his career in the spotlight by blowing the 35-word Presidential Oath of Office, some Constitutional scholars are suggesting that President Obama retake the oath... you know, just in case.

A do-over "would take him 30 seconds, he can do it in private, it's not a big deal, and he ought to do it just to be safe," said Boston University constitutional scholar and Supreme Court watcher Jack Beermann. "It's an open question whether he's president until he takes the proper oath."

..."The Constitution says what he's supposed to say," Beermann said. "... It's kind of surprising the chief justice couldn't get it right."

You hear that, Drudge? The Chief Justice couldn't get it right. Not Obama, the CHIEF JUSTICE. Can he be put in the stockade for something like that (he says with fingers crossed and hope in his voice)? But I have to agree with Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, just to stuff a sock down the naysayers' throats.

"He should probably go ahead and take the oath again," Turley said. "If he doesn't, there are going to be people who for the next four years are going to argue that he didn't meet the constitutional standard. I don't think it's necessary, and it's not a constitutional crisis. This is the chief justice's version of a wardrobe malfunction."

One reason not to retake the oath argues Beermann, is to save Roberts some embarrassment, but if that's the case, I say make him do it on national television... maybe during the Super Bowl halftime show.


UPDATE (9:45pm): Barack Obama retook the Oath of Office today. You know... just in case.

...the scene was the White House Map Room in front of a small group of reporters, not the Capitol platform before the whole watching world.

"We decided that because it was so much fun ...," Obama joked to reporters who followed press secretary Robert Gibbs into the room. No TV camera crews or news photographers were allowed in. A few of Obama's closest aides were there, along with a White House photographer.
Roberts put on his black robe.

"Are you ready to take the oath?" he said.

"Yes, I am," Obama said. "And we're going to do it very slowly."

The Roberts Oath - UPDATED

I don't want to dwell on something like this on such a momentous day, but watching Chief Justice John Roberts screw up a 35 word oath that he could have read was a little disheartening.

The oath reads, "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Watch the video and listen to Roberts juxtapose the word, "faithfully" to the end of the first part of the sentence. He looked more nervous than Obama. The President started and then paused while Roberts corected himself, they both stumbled, then moved on.

Now we'll get wingnuts say how Obama "botched" the oath, like Drudge (I won't dignify his site with a link) but we all know the truth and can smile as they wallow in their misery while watching the Inaugural events of the day and the 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

Suck it, Drudge.


UPDATE (4:30pm):

Josh Marshall: Now hearing that Roberts tried to get through the oath from memory without the text in front of him.

CHIEF JUSTICE FAIL!!!