So according to Nevada Senate candidate Sharon Angle paying into unemployment and then using it once you lose your job is "entitlement." What?
Rachel Maddow explains why this is ridiculous thinking after the jump:
Wow. Mature. Definitely the guy I want running a war. Ironically, McChystal's team nicknamed themselves, "Team America" after these guys:Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner. "Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
The trouble with appointing Stanley McChrystal to run the Af-Pak war was always his temperament and his history. He is a driven man, strong-headed, amazingly disciplined, extremely able in a limited fashion - and clearly unused to compromise or getting along with people as powerful as he is. Diplomat he is not. As head of JSOC, moreover, he has always regarded himself as above political management, running a part of the military that seems at times to answer to no-one, and that, under Bush and Cheney was unleashed to do whatever it wanted, including, of course, brutal torture in the field, condoned from the very top.
And more on the jabs at Biden:These qualities might have seemed appealing at first for Afghanistan. Here you had a former torturer/badass who had learned by brutal experience that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be won that way. Converted to counter-insurgency as a philosophy, he was an apostate from the Bush-Cheney approach of "kill, bomb and torture until they embrace human rights" school.
Sullivan continues:It doesn't take a genius to see this contempt as rooted in the growing recognition among many and the growing fear among the McChrystal clique that Biden has been right all along, that the McChrystal strategy was a product of hope over experience, and that the arrogance that drove it was part of what had long been wrong with the conduct of both tragically flawed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's a shock, isn't it? Obama essentially gave McChrystal everything he asked for, and backed the full counter-insurgency strategy. He has, in my view, foolishly thrown more resources and more ambition at this hopeless task than his predecessor ever did. And yet, McChrystal and his flunkies still feel the need to bad-mouth and mock those who lost the argument. This is news, no? It's important news. It reflects on the character and integrity of the man tasked to lead America's longest ever war. So why, one wonders, have we not heard a peep of this from all the official MSM Pentagon reporters and analysts with their deep sources and long experience?
The plan is to bankrupt everyone in the government with lawyer fees and tie up the administration so they can't get anything done. The accusations, lies and smears will dwarf the Clinton-era and the slime will destroy people's faith in government and democracy. That works for them. It helps put the big corporations in charge.
Imagine what this country will be like if this new breed of teabagger Republicans gets back in power in even one House of the Congress!
We can complain that Democrats didn't legitimately investigate Bush-era corruption, war crimes, torture... We can complain that they held no one accountable after Bush left office for the corruption, lies, war crimes, even torture. We can complain that some - even many - Democrats have not stood up for us against the wealthy and powerful.
BUT when you complain about "the Democrats" you are misinterpreting the problem in a way that misdirects you from the necessary action to solve the problem. The problem is SOME Democrats, not THE Democrats.
Well, since we were, after all, called out by name in this article, far be it for us not to respond with our own rebuttal to The Root, after the jump:I am not rooting for the knucklehead. Actually just the opposite. I refuse to be responsible for his actions. I refuse to be expected to explain his/her actions. It is not my responsibility more than anyone else in this country who is a citizen. This is the definition of agency--to exercise your full rights as citizens. If we were in some black nation within a nation that might make sense to "self-police." Then we'd have a "black tax" to pay "black officers" etc. I pay U.S. tax and local tax and that is who is responsible for police work. The sooner everyone, black white, yellow red, whatever realizes this the better. It's NOT an academic debate. Non-black people don't get to look the other way. It's their country---and their problem too. Just like its ours.
• Two-thirds of the 1,000 American adults polled couldn't name a single current justice, and just 1 percent were able to name all nine sitting justices.In a country where our national laws are crafted to give deference to whatever "the majority" of Americans want, given the fact that "the majority" of Americans do not know the basics about America, what does that say about the entire notion of "majority rule" in this country?
• More Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of "Beat It" and "Billie Jean" than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the Constitution.
• More than 50 percent of respondents attributed the quote "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs" to either Thomas Paine, George Washington or President Obama. The quote is from Karl Marx, author of "The Communist Manifesto."
• More than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place, and half of respondents believed that either the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 occurred before the American Revolution.
• With a political movement now claiming the mantle of the Revolutionary-era Tea Party, more than half of respondents misidentified the outcome of the 18th-century agitation as a repeal of taxes, rather than as a key mobilization of popular resistance to British colonial rule.
• A third mistakenly believed that the Bill of Rights does not guarantee a right to a trial by jury, while 40 percent mistakenly thought that it did secure the right to vote.
• More than half misidentified the system of government established in the Constitution as a direct democracy, rather than a republic-a question that must be answered correctly by immigrants qualifying for U.S. citizenship.