Barking Mad

Glenn Beck reacts in theatrical fashion to Joe Biden’s risible claim that stimulus spending hasn’t resulted in any significant fraud or abuse.

Of course, when umpteen billions of dollars are involved in any kind of spending program — whether it be sponsored by the government or the private sector — there’s inevitably bound to be a certain amount of waste, corruption, graft and abuse; hey, it’s just human nature, after all. But is it really fair to trash the putative aims of such initiatives on that basis alone, or to dismiss the ends because the means of achieving them were less than sanitary in nature?

Astounding…

Presented without comment. Really, I’m completely speechless.

Biden: “Are you joking? Is this a joke? Is that a real question?”

Absolutely hilarious update: Trust me… this will crack you up. (h/t: CC)

Jon Stewart to Palin: “Fuck You”

Speaking to a college audience in Boston, Mass. last Friday, Jon Stewart used his stand-up routine to respond to Sarah Palin’s comments about “pro-America” parts of the country.

Seeing as the audio is pretty crappy, here’s a transcript of is remarks:

“He (McCain) made an interesting vice presidential choice.

I like the woods… I just don’t know if I would pull my vice president out of the woods randomly.

She came out again today. She was talking to a small town, she said that small towns, that’s the part of the country she really likes going to because that’s the pro-America part of the country.

You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly… Fuck you.

I’ve never seen someone with a greater disparity between how cute they sound when they’re saying something and how terrible what they’re saying is.

Don’t ya know, Obama, by golly, he just is a terrorist? What? Oh, you know, he just, gosh, kills babies, you know.

I’m so over the idea that only small-town America is the heart and soul. Small- town America is fine, but it’s the same as cities. Cities are just a lot of towns piled on top of each other in one place.

They have this whole thing that somehow we can write off entire swaths of the country, that we are somehow… I get it. You know, New York City wasn’t good enough for fuckin’ Osama bin Laden, it better be good enough for you.

I can’t take it anymore. After eight years of this divisiveness, we’re back to this idea that only small-town America is the real America.

I get it. I’m from New York. We have a lot of gay people. But homosexuals don’t have sodomy on Russian flags.”

Here’s Joe Biden’s response to the same thing from last week:

A Confusing “Blizzard of Words”

Urgh. They just finished re-running the Palin-Biden debate from last night on CTV’s NewsNet. What on earth is Tom Velk smoking? A “great communicator on the level of Ronald Reagan…” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Here’s an example of one of her more memorable “blizzard of words” as her incoherent ramblings when departing from her talking points have been deemed:

“I’m not one to attribute every man – activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet… What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?”

ThinkProgress has some more on the “debate” and Palin’s reliance on “notes” of some kind.

Update: Via LuLu at Canadian Cynic — The Sarah Palin Flowchart!

Palin-Biden Debate Spin

I couldn’t bear to watch more than a few minutes of it.

Here’s a couple of wildly different takes on it from the left and the right.

A CNN poll asked “Who Did the Best Job In the Debate?” It came out 52% Biden, 36% Palin. A CBS poll found that 46% called it for Joe Biden, 21% for Sarah Palin, with 33% thought it was a draw. 98% after the debate saw [Biden] as knowledgeable (79% before the debate). If you’re a glutton for punishment, a transcript is available here.

Update: I like this take from Matt Yglesias — “Watching the mismatch between the complicated and mildly pro-Palin sentiments of the pundits on television and the poll results — people thought Biden was better — is interesting. It’s almost as if ordinary people don’t grade these things on a complicated “expectations” curve. When someone shows up and seems slightly dimwitted they don’t think to themselves “well, she’s not quite as dumb as I thought — what a triumph!” They think, “wow, she seems slightly dimwitted.”

McCain’s POW Card Maxed Out

In his speech yesterday in Springfield, Illinois, introducing him as Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden had a pretty funny line:

For completely unfathomable reasons, on this morning’s Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw felt compelled to act like a kind of witless concern troll by sharing some correspondence he received about Biden’s quip:

Brokaw: Chuck Todd, a career military person-who is not crazy about John McCain, immediately emailed me about that crack about seven kitchen tables, saying, “Wait a minute, that’s pretty gratuitous. Here’s a guy who spent five years in prison, not knowing where his next meal was going to come from.”

Todd: You know, it’s interesting that Democrats are getting a little more upset by that line of defense now. Coming… there’s a column this morning by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times sort of laying out this case that you know, is the McCain campaign using the…using that defense too often to try to pushback everything, but it does work, I think, with voters.

Maybe it does, but good grief, if even a stone-cold nutcase like MoDo thinks the POW “get out of gaffe free” card is “too much of a bad thing” then surely this particular line of defence has finally jumped the shark, at least among the press, if not the voters, as Todd flippantly asserts.

Our Liberal Media: With Sprinkles!

There’s a lot of chatter this morning about the so-called “analysis” of Barack Obama’s pick for vice-president by the AP’s Ron Fournier, who claims that the move “shows a lack of confidence” in the face of pressure coming from Dems worried about losing the election. No big surprise considering the dreadful source, nevertheless, hot airheads like Malkin are more than happy to uncritically lap it up. Steve Clemons at the Huffington Post has a good response explaining why Biden is, as he puts it, “vital and the right choice.”

Meanwhile, John Cole, bless his heart, zeroes in on it as being yet another fine example of the so-called liberal media’s double-standard when it comes to the treatment of Democrats and Republicans by highlighting the way George Bush’s pick of Dick Cheney in 2000 was generally received by the press. CNN’s Jeff Greenfield, for example, praised him for picking for “running mate somebody who knows the world stage” because it showed “a clear signal this is somebody with some seriousness of purpose.”

Over at PBS, veteran Republican consultant Vin Weber was wheeled out to say that it was “a great testimonial to Governor Bush that he feels secure reaching out to a person of such great stature” and went on at some length extolling what a simply wonderful decision it was, one that “reflected a tremendous stability, a tremendous amount of judgment.” Weber continued: “It reflected putting conventional political considerations like ideological balance or geographic balance behind you and putting ahead of you somebody who has serious experience in the legislative branch of government foreign policy…” &tc.

Cole sums up the predicament archly like this:

Republican names a running mate with lots of experience — a sign of wisdom and good judgment and a sense of being secure.

Democrat names a running mate with lots of experience — a profound lack of confidence.
Go liberal media!

Fournier is just one voice amongst many of course, but keep in mind that he does cover the presidential beat for the Associated Press, and as such, his “analysis” will appear in 1,500 U.S. daily newspapers. By the way, he was also one of the journalists who, at a gathering of the nation’s newspaper editors, extended McCain a box of his favourite doughnuts (“Oh, yes, with sprinkles!” McCain said, clearly delighted).

Biden Time!

Oh come on, like you didn’t see that one coming.

John King has just announced on CNN that according to “very very solid sources” Biden is Obama’s pick for vice-president. Jake Tapper reports that the secret service has dispatched a security detail to Biden’s estate in Delaware.

Well, so much for surprises.

Already the smears have started. YouTube is full of new clips of past gaffes and malicious, defamatory attacks. Disgusting. The above clip is from an appearance at the National Press Club in 2007 reading from his autobiography Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.

Update: Here’s the clip from CNN.

Update2: The “far left” can be a pretty tough crowd.