Last Call For Tiny, Tiny Violins

GOP Rep. Mike Rogers can't understand why (after six years of Republicans calling President Obama everything from Kenyan Usurper to Antichrist to Nazi Sympathizer to Brutal Dictator and more) President Obama might not want to include Republicans in his decision-making processes.

Rogers argued that the White House had other options besides releasing five Guantanamo Bay detainees in exchange for the American prisoner of war, and that the administration acted without notifying Congress because they knew there would be dissenters.

"There are other options. And this was what so angered for those of us who have followed this for years," he said on ABC's "This Week." "The administration has this theory that you're either with them or you're for thermonuclear war and there's not in between. That's just wrong." 

"And so the reason they avoided Congress, this isn't about we didn't get invited to the party, so we shouldn't have our feelings hurt. It is because we can empower all of the people -- diplomats -- who disagreed with this decision, intelligence folks who disagreed with this decision, military folks," he continued.

Poor, poor baby.  President Obama didn't extend Mike Rogers an engraved invitation to his decision on Bergdahl.  I doubt President Bush did either, all the times he released Gitmo detainees too.  But we only choose to criminalize things Obama does.

Always Angry, All The Time

Kevin Drum notes that the defining quality of American politics and President Obama is constant and unending rage, and tries (in the usual Kevin Drum way) to pin it on both sides.

The White House, says the LA Times for the third straight day, is facing "growing fury" over L'Affaire Bergdahl. How many times have I read a headline like this over the past few years. Dozens? Hundreds?

Hard to say. But it sure seems to be the defining quality of American politics these days. We just bounce from one outrage to the next, mostly ginned up by the right, but sometimes by the left too. It's a wonder that America hasn't dropped dead of a collective heart attack yet.

Has it always been this way? Maybe. It's not as if we lacked for partisan outrages in the 50s and 60s. But I'd sure like to hear from folks who have a good memory for those years. Was the procession of outrages really as nonstop as it is today? Did we at least take a break between outrages back then? Or has nothing changed except our exposure to this stuff thanks to Twitter and 24-hour cable news?

News flash, K-Drum.  "The left" isn't calling for the overthrow of the American government or backing a Second American Revolution with armed domestic terrorists encouraged to take out a few government bureaucrats with "Second Amendment remedies."

That's solely the proposition of the right, who moves to criminalize, demonize, and exterminate dissent at every turn.

It's not MSNBC openly calling for impeachment, that would be Fox News.  Repeatedly, by the way.

There is no "sometimes the left" on this dangerous idiocy, Kevin.  Knock it off.

The Godwin Party Strikes Again

And people wonder why Richard Mourdock lost his Senate race in 2012 to Joe Donnelly?  Maybe it has to do with Mourdock being a stark raving lunatic.

Reaction ranged from anger to shock to befuddlement after Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock compared the nation's direction to Hitler's Nazi Germany during a farewell speech at the Indiana Republican Convention on Saturday.

"The people of Germany in a free election selected the Nazi Party because they made great promises that appealed to them because they were desperate and destitute. And why is that? Because Germany was bankrupt," he said.

Mourdock, who has stoked outrage with incendiary comments in the past, then alluded to the 70th anniversary last week of the D-Day invasion during World War II, saying, "The truth is, 70 years later, we are drifting on the tides toward another beachhead and it is the bankruptcy of the United States of America."

See, because Democrats are just like Nazis because government spending.  Jesus.  Oh, here's the best part:

The speech received a standing ovation from the nearly 1,700 delegates from across the state.

Because this is what passes for big, new ideas in the Indiana GOP.

But by the end of the day, even the party's state chairman was distancing himself from the treasurer's comments.

His references Saturday to the Nazi regime drew sharp objections from Democrats, members of the Jewish community and even some Republicans.

Indiana Democratic Chairman John Zody said Mourdock's words were "ugly" and should be denounced by Republican leaders.

Shelby Anderson, president of the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council, said comparing the rise of Hitler and the heinous acts of the Nazis in comparison to America's national debt is "highly offensive and trivialize both the suffering and memory of the six million Jews and millions of others who perished under the Nazi regime."

Stephen Klapper, vice president of the council, called it "deplorable to suggest that a nation in debt is somehow one step away from perpetrating crimes reminiscent of Nazi Germany. And it's outrageous to equate our nation's legitimate public policy challenges, and the way we choose to address these issues – ideally through civil discourse and rigorous debate – with the way Hitler and his Nazi regime propagated one of civilization's most reprehensible atrocities through lies, terror, and ultimately genocide."

But that's what Republicans think of those who disagree with them.  Those who dissent have to be Nazis, because they clearly can't be Americans who should have the right to vote.  Hell, they're just pure evil, they're not even human, so if we have to break a few eggs taking the country back from them, well that's just gonna have to happen, right?