I'm starting to think that when someone is elected president of the U.S., they get to read some secret documents that convince him that the U.S. must always be at war.

I fear this decision has more to do with a second term than keeping America safe. I'm trying imagine a scenario under which I'd again donate $ to Obama campaign. Perhaps a Beck/Limbaugh/Palin/Bush ticket.

We’d also watched last fall as Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt entered the all-time Hall of Campaign Managerial Shame thanks to his ignominious bungling of the McCain run for the presidency, during which time Schmidt had pulled the trigger on two of the more nakedly cynical vote-getting ploys in our recent electoral history — the last-minute addition of dingbat bible-thumper Sarah Palin to the ticket in a transparent ploy to snatch up votes from the Limbaugh demographic McCain himself reviled, and the late-stage decision to use Palin to run a race-baiting campaign painting their black opponent as not “one of us.”

Not only did neither ploy work, but Schmidt may have ruined race-baiting/guilt-by-association campaign strategies at the national level for a whole generation of corrupt politicians, so badly did all his harping on Bill Ayers blow up in his face.

I should start a list of writers/publications I'll be willing to pay for. Mr. Taibbi will be near the top of that list.

What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”

And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes.

What’s different now is who else is saying it. You had these people eating out of the palms of your hands (remember what it was like in the Dixie Chicks days?). Now they’re all drawing horns and Groucho mustaches on your heroes, and rapidly transitioning you from your previous political kingmaking role in the real world to a new role as a giant captive entertainment demographic that exists solely to be manipulated for ratings and ad revenue. What you should be asking yourself is why this is happening to you. Even I don’t know the answer to that question, but honestly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I find it extremely funny.

Great conservative apparatchiks, whether Lee Atwater or Ralph Reed or others, knew well how to manipulate undereducated, rank-and-file conservatives. It's not hard, since many of them aren't that smart.

That's not to say they aren't God-fearing or hardworking or good parents or fine citizens. But they just aren't that intelligent when it comes to matters of policy or politics. They're not sophisticated enough to have much of a view on anything outside their own community, so they tend to focus on things that can be understood simply and easily - things like morality, a morality often imparted by a local church and taken as gospel without any kind of intellectual questioning.

They don't understand foreign policy or trade policy or tax policy or the kinds of economic matters the GOP power players are interested in. But they do get gay marriage and abortion and school prayer. So for a generation, the GOP talked about the latter in an attempt to gain enough power to influence the former. (N.B. Democrats do this bait-and-switch too, but I'm not talking about them right now.)

Today's conservatives, however, aren't in on the joke. Politically, they came of age hearing these paeans to Christian fundamentalism, without understanding that these were simply techniques of convenience used to sell other parts of the GOP agenda.

This is an old post (July 2009) from somebody who calls him/herself "The Recess Supervisor."

I resisted posting this because I have a bit of a thing about people who hide behind some made-up name. I think we can stipulate the person who wrote this is a lefty pinko fag (what would we do without labels?). In the end, I decided to stick it here but not link from smays.com or my Twitter feed or anywhere else.

I'm parking this here because I want to be able to find it again. So go dry swallow a couple of beta blockers and turn on Beck. This is for me, not for you.

Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.

Well, if the president wants to make sure he doesn't let down the millions who believed he really would change the rotten system, he should read the The Audacity to Win from beginning to end -- and rediscover a whole host of things he knows, but seems to have forgotten.

This perfectly sums up my frustration with our president, a man I help elect.