FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From driftglass:

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of “Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!” hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration’s bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra “9/11 changed everything” as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ — as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement — for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper’s nest from which they could cynically escalate —

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

— their war on the Left.

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

My wife and I married in 1978. One of our first purchases was a used tube console color TV that we purchased from Marv Hartman TV in Bryan, Ohio. We paid $125. We continued to watch TV for a few years, until one day I decided that watching TV was a sin. This was in the mid-1980s. After swearing off watching TV, I decided that no one, if he were a good Christian anyway, should be watching television. One Sunday, as pastor of Somerset Baptist Church in Mt Perry, Ohio, I preached a 90-minute sermon on the evils of watching television and going to the movies. I called on all true Christians to immediately get rid of their TVs and follow their preacher into the pure air of a Hollywood-free world.

To prove my point, I gathered the congregation out in front of the church for a physical demonstration of my commitment to following the TV-hating Jesus. I put our TV in the church yard and I hit it several times with a sledge-hammer, breaking the TV into pile of electronic rubble. Like the record burnings of the 1970s, my act was meant to show that I was willing to do whatever it took to be an on-fire, sold-out follower of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Just before I hit the TV with the sledge-hammer, a church member by the name of Gary said to me, Hey preacher, if you don’t want that TV I’ll take it. How dare he ruin my sin-hating demonstration! I thought at the time. I gave Gary a scowling look and proceeded to knock the devil right out of the TV.

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An old friend says goodbye:
 
From conservative T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense:

It was perhaps a dozen years ago when I first really started frequenting various blogs on the internet on a regular basis, with most of them being of a political or religious nature. On one site that I frequented fairly regularly, the host of the blog stated that I seemed to have a lot to say and perhaps I should get my own blog accordingly. I am relatively certain that he was not being complimentary towards me, but nonetheless, I took up his suggestion and nine years ago today Saving Common Sense was born.

Early on I had some very supportive readers of all political stripes. Indeed, even those followers with whom my opinions on politics did not match ended up being thoughtful folks with which to debate and share ideas. Oh, there was always the occasional troll, but by and large I found blogging to be stimulating and interesting as I shared my opinions, thoughts, and ideas with my fellow brothers and sisters in the blogosphere. Further, based on the feedback I would receive, it appeared that many of my readers felt similarly.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

President Obama hit the campaign trail last Friday with a great speech in Illinois. He is planning to campaign hard for Democratic candidates this year.

I think we can take three important things from this.

1. In spite of what the talking heads on cable news would have you believe, the Democratic Party is not leaderless. It has a great leader — Barack Obama. And he will be the party’s leader until someone new captures the support of most Democrats.

2. There are no perfect policies or politicians, but we don’t need perfection. We just need to make things better, because better is always good.

3. It is up to us, the voters, to make things better in this country — and we do that by voting for better candidates.

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From our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

I was living in the Boston area when Hurricane Bob was tracking towards there. I was at a grocery store, buying a few supplies. There was someone behind of me in line with a cartload of frozen food. I looked at the shopped and said: “Wow, you’ve got a lot of food, there.”

Shopper: “There’s a hurricane coming.”

Me: “What are you going to do with all that frozen stuff if the power goes out?”

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From PERRspectives:

It’s with good reason that his 2008 rival Barack Obama repeatedly called him an “American hero.” It’s no wonder Democrats and Republicans alike, from Joe Biden (D-DE) and Gary Hart (D-CO) to William Cohen (R-ME) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called him “my friend.” And it’s no surprise that his former captors in Hanoi paid their respects to the man who once languished in agony in their prison only to later help lead the painful process of reconciliation between Vietnam and the United States.

But for many in the press, wistful for the glory days of the “Straight Talk Express” and perhaps nostalgic for a more decent era in American politics, the tributes have often verged on hagiography. (Perhaps that’s no surprise given the 2008 assessment of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “The press loves McCain. We’re his base.”) “With tears on my cheeks,” Dana Milbank wrote in May that “John McCain is the single greatest political leader of our time.” For its part, USA Today compiled “six memorable moments when John McCain earned a reputation as a ‘maverick.'”

I would add a seventh such “Maverick Moment,” because it would later come to reveal more about John McCain the man than anyone realized at the time.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

But after a couple of days, Trump eventually did what he always does, and tweeted:

Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?

First of all, if the libel laws were changed to make it easier to respond to libel, Trump himself would end up being sued constantly for all the lies he has tweeted about people. If you don’t believe me, read the immediate responses to that tweet.

What takes this to the level of being a hypocritical lie is that before he was president, Trump berated the Obama administration for attacking Bob Woodward, tweeting “Only the Obama WH can get away with attacking Bob Woodward.” But now, Trump seems to think he can get away with attacking Woodward. Sad!

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From Frances Langum:

This was a meeting with the entire communications staff and the press shop, meeting to talk about tax reform or his trip to North Korea. He crashed the meeting, he came into the meeting, he sat down and he starts rambling from topic to topic, none of it makes sense.

The main topic discussed on the tape was Hillary’s collusion with the Russians and misuse of campaign funds. Not making that up.

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From Andy Borowitz:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump demanded on Friday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions investigate who put a sign reading “Entering Crazytown, U.S.A.” on the door to the Oval Office.

Trump reportedly noticed the sign for the first time Friday morning, and became enraged after asking Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, to read what it said to him.

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From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

This weekend I saw an NBC promo that featured some CNBC analyst purporting to advise people who are having problems with their boss.

Short version: stop forcing your boss to “explain your behavior to other people.”

Fact: If your boss is spending even five seconds “explaining your behavior to other people,” then you do indeed have a big problem. Your big problem is that your boss is an asshole.

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