Didn’t know it, until just now. 27 years of playing ‘hangman’ everyday might affect your cognition, though, don’t you think? I have a hard time imagining that we’d be publishing op-eds from jillionaire hosts of dumbfuck game shows. Perhaps he sees himself as their George Clooney.

Not shockingly, Pat takes issue with people who think they’re smarter than he is.

Opposed to Obamacare? Then You Must Be a Racist
by Pat Sajak
03/29/2010

. . It turns out, according to [Frank Rich's] well-crafted analysis, that it’s not the bill that’s got people in an uproar; rather, what we’re facing is the death rattle of a dwindling cadre of white, racist, sexist, homophobic males terrified by the ascent of people of color, women and gays.

As the ever-tolerant Rich reasons: “The conjunction of a black President and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.”

Pat does not understand the considerable difference between ‘intolerance’ and ‘analysis.’ If you write what you see, apparently you’re a bigot. He never makes a case why it isn’t possible that Rich is right, he’s just wrong. Such is a damning indictment from a TV star given the answers to all the puzzles.

So that’s it. It’s just a bunch of scared, white males who would yelp about anything this gang came up with. As Rich makes clear, this is merely a replay of the opposition to the Voting Rights Act of 1964. You get it?

Uh, nope. Rich was talking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not the Voting Rights Act of 1965. WHEEL . . OF . . MISFORTUNE.

Oh well. On the previous election trail, Pat also felt compelled to call out those stupid smarty pants:

Here Come the Dimwits…Again
by Pat Sajak
09/15/2008

You knew it was just a matter of time before the Democrats played their quadrennial election trump card by claiming they (and, by extension, their voters) are — well, you know — smarter than the other side. This has been going on at least since the brilliant Adlai Stevenson lost consecutive elections to the dull-witted Dwight Eisenhower back in the 50s.

Pat’s trump card, over and over, is “When you’re more popular, you’re actually smarter.” He’s been killing Alex Trebek with that one.

It’s funny how the bottom 50 percent seemed wise enough when the polls were pointing to an Obama victory in November. Now, with momentum favoring the McCain/Palin ticket, apparently half the electorate has begun taking another dose of “stupid pills.”

I watch enough political TV shows featuring talking heads yelling at each other to know there are scores of self-described “Democratic Strategists” out there. It seems to me at least one of them might devise a strategy that doesn’t depend on insulting half the population at the same time they’re asking for their votes because they care so much about them.

Only a real dimwit would fall for that one.

. . and then Obama won in a blowout? Either way you score it, by Sajak’s own ‘intolerance’, he’s crowning his own people as dimwits.

This is a strange one. There’s some satire, and then there’s someone who merely skims it to criticize it on its face. Strange enough. Except the purpose of the piece was to point out the hopelessness of vital satire in an environment that’s over-wrought and partisan. So Michael Barone fell right into it.

It begins with Rochelle Gurstein writing in the New Republic:

The Baby Lottery
A rational redistributive plan.
Rochelle Gurstein

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people “earn” as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might “level the playing field,” as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property–and let’s face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn’t always work out so well–how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Every child is finally given a fair shot at the ‘good life’ in the greatest country on Earth. Races caring for each others’ babies creates a colorblind society. Knowing your ‘familial’ child lives with somebody else makes sectors and strata of society genuinely interested in the well-being of the once ‘outsiders’ — you don’t know where your kid ended up, so it’s important for everybody, rich and poor, to do well. You fight for the other because that’s probably who’s raising your own.

Yeah, it’s insane, nothing is more coveted than your own flesh and blood. And your family and your heritage are the first things you are, and that’s fine. And, certainly, forcing the well-off to submit their children into perhaps poverty (there’s plenty of that) would be mind-numbingly, tyrannically cruel. But, then, no one deserves it, right? That’s how satire goes: it’s to expose essential truths by way perhaps of a wild ‘proposal’.

Michael Barone, he of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Examiner, took only a moment to read a few words, sniff a liberal rat and crank out a column:

She is kidding, isn’t she?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

I’ve been reading the New Republic for decades, even though (or perhaps because) it’s a wildly uneven publication. It can publish as thoughtful and intellectually rigorous a figure as William Galston, whose every word is worth serious attention. And it can publish some real garbage. In the second category (I think) falls what the website calls “Our New Columnist’s Rational Plan for Redistributing Babies.” The “new columnist,” Rachel Gurstein, writes, “how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?”

That’s right, not even close to her name.

It turns out (I think) that she’s kidding; her citation of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is one tipoff. But her proposal has some roots, as she notes, with the famed and in some liberal quarters revered political philosopher John Rawls. He argued that all public policy proposals should be assessed from the perspective of one who does not know into what station of life he or she is born. It turns out that when you do this you end up opting for a cradle-to-grave welfare state (or at least Rawls did). The problem with this, I have long thought, is that we aren’t born this way, we are born into families (or some other child care situation), we are raised in a particular milieu which is only part of a larger society and at a particular point in history.

In other words, “While I recognize this proposal is a satirical one, I would pause to add this: life simply doesn’t work this way. So this is a bad idea.”

Cough. Or: “Yes, yes, it’s satire. But it’s bad politics, you know.”

Stupefying. Well, to sharpen all the 90-degree vertices of his analysis, Barone adds:

So while Rachel [sic] Gurstein isn’t really suggesting that babies should be redistributed at birth, it seems that the idea is in some way appealing to her—even while she presumably understands that it will sound appalling to the very large majority of Americans. There are clues here to why the Democrats’ health care policies are so unpopular with the American people.

Amazing. Just brilliant. But it gets better, if that’s possible: the point of Gurstein’s piece wasn’t the utopian gambit or comedy. It was that in this wholly bizarre and hyper-partisan political world, the preceding satire seems to have become pointless ( . . and perhaps Barone should have read the whole thing?).

The lack of a common reality, of universal up and down, has rendered hyperbole almost impossible to detect and compass:

. . well-meaning friends have repeatedly cautioned me against it, for fear–baseless, no doubt–that my intentions will be misunderstood. The more I protest that my scheme is as clear as the night is long –the old New York lottery slogan “You gotta be in it, to win it” at last made universal; Rawls’s theoretical “veil of ignorance” finally put into practice–the more insistent and stern and dour these same friends become: “You’ll see, they will think you are trying to destroy their precious idea of the American family, the bedrock of society.” “You’ll see, they will accuse you of being a fascist, a Nazi.” . . Have we now come to the point, I wondered, that our shared sense of reality is so tenuous that something as outrageous to common sense as my big baby lottery will not immediately be recognized as political satire?

. . you are kidding, aren’t you?

. . Like Tina Fey mimicking Sarah Palin, what passes for satire today plays on our incredulity, presenting us with an exact replica of something real but at the same time so absurd that it beggars our belief. It gets a laugh, but what is missing is the wild, inspired, visionary flights of imagination that masters of satire like Jonathan Swift so excelled at. Through caustic hyperbole, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to raise Irish babies like cattle and sell them to Englishmen for dinner in order to eliminate overpopulation and poverty in Ireland made his first readers–and us, too, almost three centuries after them–see and feel how the world appears from the standpoint of common decency.

And, for me, that’s it. When there’s no “common decency”, satire becomes hopeless, doesn’t it? There’s no one beating heart to it, no bullseye to hit. Communication becomes a crapshoot, like trying to squint and see one of those fractal space shuttles behind the multi-colored chaos. Did you get it — can you see it?

And when one side of the political world, as a matter of policy, becomes so mechanically bent on taking an axe to the other, no matter what’s said or done, the fragments are all that’s universal. As in: “Bringing down deficits is the decent thing to do, but if you proffer a pay/go rule before we do, not one of us will vote for it . .”

Nobody writes like that any more and I could not help wondering if the extinction of satire that attempts to shame people into recognizing that there are things higher and worth striving towards than what merely happens to exist was a sign of just how poverty-stricken our moral, political, and literary imaginations have become.

And there is the point. She could have paid Barone to write his post, but he did it for free.

Came across this at StarkReports:

This is difficult to write. My grandfather suffered through dementia for the last 15 years of his life. It’s never easy to talk about, and in politics, it’s particularly difficult because of all the potential for cheap-shot concern-trolling…

But there’s a dirty little secret everyone is keeping in Pennsylvania and Washington. It isn’t difficult to puzzle it out for yourself; in fact, given the circumstances, it’s probably difficult to avoid developing nagging suspicions. But there are a lot of stories being told off the record and in hushed whispers. Tonight, I’ve decided to stop whispering and come forward with my own.

Mike is talking about Arlen Specter.

. . In the basement of the Russell Senate office building, there is a subway that ferries Senators and staff to and from the Capitol. Senator Spector was making his way over to the Capitol to cast a vote when I caught up with him and asked if he had decided to support or oppose the Bernanke nomination. He said he hadn’t decided. I asked him if he knew that Bernanke had said he was less concerned about unemployment than inflation. Specter answered gruffly that he was still making up his mind. Then he walked over to a call-button for the subway and pressed it several times.

The subway was already in the station.

It’s not like you can hide a subway.

The guard behind us yelled to the Senator, “Senator, he’s right there!” The driver of the subway yelled to the Senator, “Senator, I’m right here!” Specter continued to press the button for another coupla seconds before suddenly realizing the subway was already in the station and boarding.

A week ago, Specter inexplicably wandered up onto a ‘stage’ that his opponent was currently addressing a crowd from:

Arlen Specter’s Kanye West Moment

After refusing to debate his opponent and insisting on strict rules for tonight’s Senate forum with Joe Sestak Sen. Arlen Specter stormed the stage while the Congressman was speaking and seemingly tried to confront and/or intimidate him while he was speaking at the Pennsylvania Progressive Summit…

Obviously standing just off the ballroom listening not only to the questions but to Joe Sestak’s responses he cheated on the format. Then for some very strange reason he bounded for the stage and mounted it. Was he having a senior moment, was he trying to throw Sestak off his game on live TV or was he deliberately trying to sabotage what was a finely organized event?

Saturday, after winning the Pennsylvania State Democratic committee endorsement, he couldn’t recall the name of a Pennsylvania Senator he wanted to call out:

LANCASTER, Pa. — Even as he accepted the resounding backing of the Pennsylvania Democratic state committee here Saturday, party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter’s vulnerability was on vivid display as he botched the name of a key Democratic officeholder in his acceptance speech.

“I’ll be fighting hard for the entire Democratic ticket. Sen. Andy — Andy —” Specter said, before pausing briefly, squinting his eyes.

“From Chester County,” he continued, losing his train of thought after clinching an emphatic 229-72 Senate endorsement vote from party regulars just minutes earlier.

“Dinniman,” the crowd responded almost in unison, referring to the state senator who represents West Chester. One committee member seated in the audience dropped his head and shook it.

President Obama has made the rounds, spectacularly. But the politics are probably over, for the time, for the towering talent that leads the Democrats by word alone. Such are Roman Senators .

Al Franken lays into David Axelrod over health care bill
By ANDY BARR & MANU RAJU | 2/4/10 7:47 PM EST

Sen. Al Franken ripped into White House senior adviser David Axelrod this week during a tense, closed-door session with Senate Democrats.

Five sources who were in the room tell POLITICO that Franken criticized Axelrod for the administration’s failure to provide clarity or direction on health care and the other big bills it wants Congress to enact…

In his public session with the senators Wednesday, Obama urged them to “finish the job” on health care but did not lay out a path for doing so. That uncertainty appeared to trigger Franken’s anger, and the sources in the room said he laid out his concerns much more directly than any senator did in the earlier public session.

The private session was set up in a panel format, with Axelrod joined at the front of the room by Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine and Democratic strategist Paul Begala.

ADD: He did it again, today — attacking the CEO of Comcast for lying to his face:

Minnesota, you should be proud, the guy’s a damn good Senator.

In recent modern times, I’m guessing the tax rates for the rich are just barely above the lowest they’ve ever been, and, for corporations, they’re at an all-time low.

Meanwhile, America is in dire straits, needing a great deal of work to be done in a short period of time to get the nation back on track. Will the President ask the rich, who have already recovered from the recession/depression nicely, thanks, to chip in a fairer share to get the hard work done? No.

And the rich are who Fox News are — Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. That’s who Rush Limbaugh is, too. But Obama won’t push back against them, and this is the pathetic result. They only pretend to care about poor folks while getting paid $20 plus million a year to shitstorm the public airwaves, and the President can’t bother to point it out. So, he’ll just do their bidding instead.

Instead, he’s going to limit the government to appease the bitchy wealthy — ‘deficits’ and such (during an epic national crisis). It’s a time when huge debts are reasonable and necessary, but why lead the nation by making that point when you can cave to the usurious parasites of America?

Meanwhile, Oregon, which was a toss-up state in 2000 that barely snuck under the wire for Gore days after the election, just voted to tax the rich. Yes, in the new ‘GOVERNMENT IS A WRECKLESS, BLOOD-SUCKING VAMPIRE’ universally iron-clad political environment of the post-Massachusetts debacle, a majority just trudged out to the polls to demand the well-off pitch in to make the state better. IMPOSSIBLE!

Oregon Voters Approve Tax Increase
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: January 27, 2010

Two ballot measures that would raise taxes on businesses and higher-income residents in Oregon appeared headed for approval late Tuesday.

The tax increases, which would raise about $727 million largely for public education and social services, were approved last year by the Legislature, but later put to a public referendum after opponents gathered signatures in a petition campaign.

The Legislature, controlled by Democrats, has already put the $727 million into the current budget. So if the ballot items, known as Measures 66 and 67, had been rejected, lawmakers would have been forced to hold a special session to find other ways to reduce spending or raise revenue.

Tax measures have frequently failed at the polls in Oregon, one of only five states without a state sales tax. The state depends largely on income and property taxes to raise revenue.

Experts noted that, given the broader recession and Oregon’s 11 percent unemployment rate, Measures 66 and 67 had been carefully drawn to focus on wealthier residents and businesses.

Measure 66 raises income taxes on individuals who earn more than $125,000 and on couples who earn more than $250,000, less than 3 percent of the state population. Measure 67 raises taxes and fees on most businesses.

While some large businesses could see taxes increase by tens of thousands of dollars per year, many would pay an extra $140 in state fees. Business groups opposed Measure 67 but they were outspent by unions for teachers and public employees.

No!

Measures 66 and 67 passing by wide margin . . .

Well, whatever, Oregon’s just a Big Blue State, that’s it. Not like Massachusetts . . .

He’s going to propose a three multi-year budgetary spending freeze. The country actually needs a bigger stimulus, but why worry about what’s best when you’re worried about Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or whomever? He’s given up on the idea of making the case for what’s actually necessary, of leading the country like a president should, and he’s just decided to react to what the shallow populists have been saying.

Marc Ambinder breaks down the possible reactions:

There are several ways to interpret the politics of this breaking news. One is that it is reactive and will be seen as such. The second is that it represents a serious effort at budget discipline, and providing that the president can bypass the filter of Congress, his own base, and the right wing noise machine, he could restore some credibility as a bipartisan leader.

Three: it will become poisoned by its association with Congress, which, surprise, surprise, in an election year, will be forced to make the cuts.

Four: Republicans will scoff at it for being relatively meaningless and Democrats will undersell it because they’re not enthusiastic, which somehow will send a cue to the folks between the 40 yard lines (as Chris Matthews likes to say) that this the real thing. Real risk, chance of reward: small.

That’s why Ambinder thinks it’s awesome. Sure. What the hell did we get with this Obama guy?

McConnell: Obama lost support because he governed ‘hard left’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says that President Barack Obama would have had more support in the Senate if he just governed more towards the middle. “As I’ve said all year, if he wants to meet us in the middle of the political spectrum we’ll be there to help,” McConnell told NBC’s David Gregory Sunday.

What part of “the middle” is “NO”? Since when has McConnell even seen “the middle”?

Another Dem backs down: ‘Scale back’ our agenda

“I think the President Is going to have to scale back his agenda after we pass health care reform,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) in an interview with ABC News.

Echoing a common theme among pundits and conservative Democrats, Nelson said, “I think he’s allowed the left wing pull him too much in that direction.”

And a Democrat, great. And the evidence of that left wing influence would be . . . what? It doesn’t exist. Gitmo is still open, we’re still in Iraq, we’ve escalated in Afghanistan, domestic spying still continues, Bush’s U.S. attorneys still have their jobs, the banks and banksters are as rich and dangerous as they ever were, there hasn’t been an iota of finance reform, and real healthcare reform is about get jettisoned. Do these people even know who the leftists are and what they want? Obama is the last person in the world that would appease the left, he’s defiant.

Chris Matthews and Panel Still Touting the “Obama Moved Too Far to the Left” Meme

Brooks: Yeah, what’s the biggest issue of our lifetime? It’s that people used to trust government in the New Deal and the Great Society. Now like 17% of Americans trust government. And this distrust of government has been building and building and building. And Massachusetts is a phenomenon of that. And so the question before the Democrats is do we listen to the people and say hey, we’re scaling back, or do we say we really believe in our agenda, we don’t care what you say. We believe in it so much we’re going forward. And that’s the crucial decision they have.

People learned to trust government during the New Deal because it worked. Since Reagan, government has been a punching bag for the right wing. They beat the hell out of it, make it completely ineffective, populate it with idiots like Phil Gramm, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, then when it tanks the nation, they say “SEE?”

And then they ride a populist wave of anger back into office to do it all over again. You break the cycle by making government effective. You can’t make government effective by listening to people who promise to destroy it.

Republicans are terrified of healthcare reform because it will benefit millions of people. That’s exactly why you PASS HEALTHCARE REFORM IN THE FACE OF GREAT OPPOSITION. Now. People will get “it” after they get it. They trust the government after it does good things for them. How the hell do you think Roosevelt got re-elected three times? Pass the bill.

The poor Democrats are scared. And their feelings are hurt. And if ever there were a bunch of political pansies on the scene, it’s this bunch.

After the Martha Chokeley ass-whipping in Massachusetts, they feel America is angry with healthcare reform, and they don’t know what to do.

“Obviously, you cannot just proceed as if nothing happened, because something very significant happened,” [Chuck] Schumer said, referring to Brown’s victory.

So, Dianne Feinstein thinks we should slow down: “I think we do go slower in health care. People do not understand it, it is so big it is beyond their comprehension. And if you don’t understand it when somebody tells you it does this or it does that and it’s not true, you tend to believe it, even though it isn’t true . . .”

Senator Dodd thinks we should take a break and work on other issues: “Maybe we do need to take this time — look, it didn’t work, this process — and say ‘Look, I want all of us to take a month,’” Dodd said. “It isn’t as if you’ll have nothing to do around here. There’s a lot of other issues that could fill up the time of the Congress while we sat down and see if there wasn’t some way to resolve these differences and come up with a health care bill.”

Congressman Delahunt thinks we should break reform into a series of bills and pass them over time: “I think that we would get a good policy out of a series of bills that were brought up over the next several months,” Delahunt said during an appearance on MSNBC, urging a more modest approach. “What I think we should do is have discrete votes on all of the issues.”

Congressman Yarmuth feels the same: “I think what would probably be the best thing, from my perspective, for us to do the best thing on healthcare is to send pieces of the program — pass them here, send them to the Senate — and let the American people digest them bit by bit,” Yarmuth said during an appearance on Fox News. “All the surveys show that people like the individual elements of what we in the House were trying to do.”

Frankly, these people are idiots.

You’ve got two sweeping reform bills that have already passed. After a year of hard work, they’re sitting right on the precipice, inches from becoming law. Millions of Americans have needed this reform for decades.

Meanwhile, Republicans will oppose everything that Democrats try to do with healthcare, ever. There’s no possibility of even the smallest compromise. So, if you pause, or if you slow down, or break it all up into tiny pieces, what do you get in return? So close to an epic political victory for your side and for Americans everywhere, what’s the payoff for throwing away your advantage?

Absolutely nothing. Fucking ZERO.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI), speaking with a gaggle of reporters after the event, said that while state Sen. Scott Brown (R) offers voters a quick fix, in reality, the problems created by “George Bush and his cronies” are not so easily solved.

“If you think there’s magic out there and things can be turned around overnight, then you would vote for someone who could promise you that, like Scott Brown,” Kennedy said. “If you don’t, if you know that it takes eight years for George Bush and his cronies to put our country into this hole … then you know we have a lot of digging to do, but some work needs to be done and this president’s in the process of doing it and we need to get Marsha Coakley to help him to do that.”

“This is not a decision that I would have made.

“I think terrorism isn’t just attack, it’s anxiety and I think you feel the anxiety and frustration of New Yorkers who took the bullet for the rest of the country,”

New York Governor David Paterson plays his hand, tries to save his political future.

Fourteen months after being elevated to the governor’s job, David A. Paterson is deeply unpopular among New Yorkers, who doubt his ability to grapple with the state’s increasingly bleak economic situation, according to a poll by The New York Times, Cornell University and NY1 News.

Sensing the futility of trying to jam Paterson down the throats of New Yorkers in the next gubernatorial election, the White House let him know that he will not be their man.

When President Obama’s aides lowered the boom on Gov. Paterson, it was really a two-fer aimed as much at another White House worry: former Mayor Rudy Giuliani…

The political jujitsu dealt a blow to Republican Giuliani’s gubernatorial chances, since it’s now more likely the former mayor’s opponent would now be the Democrat’s undisputed heavyweight, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, experts said.

So what did Paterson do? Sided with Giuliani on the terrorists/security ‘issue’, of all things.

“Our country was attacked on its own soil on September 11, 2001 and New York was very much the epicenter of that attack. Over 2,700 lives were lost,” he said.

“We still have been unable to rebuild that site and having those terrorists so close to the attack is gonna be an encumbrance on all New Yorkers.”

How do you like that language? ‘Please, no, not now, we can’t get over it, we’re hurting too bad…’ There’s some real strength in leadership. What about the city’s own justice system, populated by New Yorkers, trying and convicting the bastards? Some local legal retribution? No?

Or would some of you rather just traffic in noun/verb/nine-eleven Giuliani impersonations?

“I think it’s a logistical and security nightmare for the American People,” Alice Hoagland, mother of a 9/11 victim, said.

Okay.