[guest post by JVW]

I chickened out on the headline, but Charlie Cooke over at NRO has it exactly right: Joe Biden is an Asshole. We have discussed this now and again with respect to his denial of his seventh grandchild and his failure to own up to his son Hunter’s tawdry and embarrassing lifestyle along with his general peevishness and grouchiness, and Charlie Cooke makes it plain:

He’s an asshole. Can we not all see it? For those who cannot conceive of truth without triangulation, I will freely stipulate that Donald Trump is an asshole, too — and that, in some ways, he’s an even worse one. But that does not let Biden off the hook. President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”

The court stenographers (as Rush Limbaugh used to call them) still want us to believe that Joe Biden is a lovable, grandfatherly, figure who — ok, sure — may from time to time lash out in a rather startling manner but who otherwise is dedicated to restoring honor and dignity to the White House. Pish posh. He’s a raging jackass, a man who was only about half-bright to begin with and now has lived long enough to witness his mind turning to mush in his dotage, which in itself has made him infinitely more irascible and stubborn. Mr. Cooke continues:

At Axios, Alex Thompson reports the apparently surprising news that Biden “has such a quick-trigger temper that some aides try to avoid meeting alone with him.” Among the president’s favorite admonitions are: “God dammit, how the f**k don’t you know this?!,” “Don’t f**king bullsh*t me!,” and “Get the f**k out of here!” Per Thompson, these revelations are important because, like his refusal to acknowledge his own granddaughter, they threaten to damage Biden’s “carefully cultivated image as a kindly uncle.” But that image is for cretins and sycophants. Joe Biden has never been a “kindly uncle” — or anything approaching one. For his whole life, Joe Biden has been a plodding mediocrity with a Delaware-sized chip on his shoulder. What about him, I wonder, would not lead him to shout stupidly at people? He’s a bully. Check. He’s insecure. Check. He’s senile. Check. He is hostage to his precarious record of lies. Check. His anger is as inevitable as the sunset.

The President’s eruptions of sputtering episodes of rage are apparently even directed at young female staffers. It was just the other day that an older powerful white male speaking harshly to young women aides was considered to be absolutely unacceptable and an unquestioned abuse of authority. These days, with a progressive establishment desperate to keep Democrats in power and stuck with a truly wretched human being as party leader, the media is finding it harder and harder to cover for this pompous jerkwad. Not that they don’t try. The same Axios article which related President Biden’s awful temper took some ameliorating steps to explain them away by dutifully quoting an unnamed Biden aide who insists that the Boss’s temper-tantrums and barbed outbursts demonstrate a measure of respect for the unlucky recipient. They also quote unnamed employees of Team Biden as pondering whether more public displays of his temper would help assuage concerns by the voters that the 80-year Chief Executive lacks passion for the job, somehow ignoring the fact that Biden has on many occasions shown his prickly and pugnacious side, never really to any positive effect save for his most devoted fans.

Whether it’s in lashing out at other branches of government, his repeated lies and fairy-tales, or the simple bullying of his overmatched staff, Joe Biden has proven conclusively that he is unfit for the office which he holds. Given that this has been the trend for our Chief Executives in recent years and that there is a very strong chance that next year’s election will come down to two grossly unfit choices offered up by our two major political parties, we seem to be entering into the dying days of the American experiment. It was fun while it lasted, but we voters proved to be incapable of keeping our Republic, just as Benjamin Franklin seemed to foreshadow nearly a quarter-millennium ago.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

President Joe Biden ventured out to our fiftieth state today to try his hand at consoling the families impacted by the terrible Maui fires earlier this month. As is his wont, he oafishly attempted to interject his own story in there, and it unsurprisingly fell flat:

Biden says "Jill and I have a little sense of what it's like to lose a home" and then tells the story of when lightning struck his house in 2004 and says "I almost lost my '67 corvette and my cat."

According to a report from the time, the lighting strike caused "a small fire… pic.twitter.com/V8IBfoZuEW

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 22, 2023

As we’ve mentioned before, Joe Biden is indeed a man whose life has been touched by tragedy, tragedy that none of us would ever want to endure. Yet as we have also discussed, he seems to feel entitled to augment that tragedy through exaggerations and fabrications, a weird personality disorder that makes him at once pathetic and aggravating. He took the horrible death of his first wife and infant daughter and spun it into a self-serving lie about a drunk trucker driving recklessly, and later turned the sad story of his oldest son’s death from cancer into an unsubstantiated tale of being caused by burn pit exposure, adding when he is at his worst repeated false claims that Beau Biden died in Iraq rather than at Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland. Now he is embellishing the story about a small house fire which was contained to one room, the kitchen, and put out within 20 minutes of the arrival of firefighters and comparing it to a raging blaze that ripped through important and historic parts of the island and has killed over 100 people with more than 800 still unaccounted for. He tries to deny the comparison by prefacing it with “I don’t want to compare difficulties,” and then of course delivers the “but” and proceeds to do exactly that, and he fibs about nearly losing his house when contemporary news reports indicate the fire wasn’t a particularly big deal.

As if that is not bad enough, the President makes light of the fire at his home by pointing out that he nearly lost his 1967 Corvette and his cat (after claiming to have “almost lost my wife” who no doubt scurried out of the home unharmed as soon as the fire started). From the video it appears that nobody laughs, but the President immediately transitions to “All kidding aside. . .” and carries on. There were undoubtedly people at that event who lost loved ones in the fire and had to sit through that demented stumblebum joking about the narrowly-missed tragedy of his mid-life crisis automobile. Because Joe Biden is a Democrat and because he is — brace yourself — the party’s best chance of holding on to the White House next year, the media is going to once again give him a pass on his blundering insensitivity and tall tales, because that’s what they do. Indeed, an Internet search at this moment suggests that only the usual suspects — Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner — have deigned to point out how disgusting this part of his speech truly was. The Washington Times has the best headline: “Biden compares Maui wildfire devastation to that time lightning almost killed his cat.” Somehow I think the big boys at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS, AP, Reuters, etc., would have a much different reaction had a Donald Trump said something this oafish and obnoxious.

What a complete asshole.

– JVW

[guest post by JVW]

File this under “the least unexpected news from the Biden Administration”:

The New York art gallery representing Hunter Biden’s exorbitantly expensive painting collection sold his artwork to a Democratic-donor socialite whom President Biden appointed to a special U.S. commission of international significance.

Despite the assurance of the Biden administration that the president’s son, for ethical reasons, would be left in dark about the identity of his buyers, Hunter later discovered the identities of two of them, sources told Business Insider. One of those two clients received a presidential privilege in the form of a commission placement.

The buyer in question was California investor and philanthropist Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali, who contributed $13,414 to the Biden campaign and $29,700 to the Democratic National Campaign Committee this year, Insider reported.

Biden announced Hirsh Naftali’s appointment to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad in July 2022 — eight months after Hunter’s art debuted at the gallery. The commission is an independent agency of the U.S. government; it’s tasked with reporting on cemeteries, monuments, and historic buildings in Eastern and Central Europe that involve American heritage.

A spot on the commission was highly coveted by Democratic elites, Insider noted. Eric Schwerin, Hunter Biden’s longtime business associate, landed the role in 2015 via appointment by President Obama. An email from that year found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop indicated that the president’s son might have helped facilitate Schwerin’s nomination, the outlet said.

We were all being gaslighted by the Democrat Establishment when they told us that Hunter Biden, self-taught and a practitioner of his craft for only a few months before “being discovered,” was a serious and legitimate artist, so it should come as no surprise to us that his art sales have become a back-channel into the sort of crony corruption around which the Biden Family seems to center their private enterprises. The article goes on to remind us that one of Biden fils’ masterpieces fetched $875,000. It’s no wonder that Hunter Biden settled his child support claims regarding Joe’s unacknowledged granddaughter by giving her mother paintings of his to sell. They know they are pulling a fast one on us, and they are laughing at us as they do because they know the left-wing art world has their back. Barack Obama’s former head of the Office of Government Ethics has criticized this arrangement from the beginning and predicted exactly what has transpired, with wealthy patrons becoming known to the Biden Administration despite promises to the contrary, and then receiving the benefits of their patronage.

And at the same time this story broke, keen-eyed observers noticed a shift in the White House’s strategy in describing Joe Biden’s knowledge of his son’s business dealings. Since his days as Vice-President, when Hunter Biden began doing business in Ukraine and China, the official Team Biden line had until now been that Joe Biden doesn’t discuss his son’s business dealings with him, and a pliant media had been happy to take them at their word. But now, as allegations continue to emerge that Joe Biden personally met and almost certainly chatted with Hunter Biden’s business partners and clients, the White House has suddenly updated their pro forma response to a denial that the President has ever been in business with his son. I don’t know about you, but it sure sounds to me like the White House now expects the release of credible evidence that Joe Biden is well-acquainted with his son’s overseas enterprises.

Fortunately for the doddering old fool, lying to the media and the American public is not a criminal offense. But even the worst offenders in the suck-up media culture have to realize that they’ve been played for the chumps that they are, and if they have one iota of pride they might think to register a complaint and maybe even reevaluate their assessment of the forty-sixth President’s character. If Joe Biden changes his mind about running for reelection — or, let’s be very clear about it, has his mind changed for him — then it would seem that the Democrats should want to have all of this sorted out before the end of the summer. Time is running out.

– JVW

This piece of mine was published on Saturday but I wanted to bring it to your attention if you missed it.

The piece is a hybrid, with a standalone free portion describing the problems with the way Stewart conducts his discourse, and a paid portion addressing his specific arguments on racial discrepancies in socioeconomic factors.

Excerpt from the free part:

I will begin with some background about the show itself, before diving into the actual arguments advanced by Stewart. Andrew Sullivan has described how Stewart’s bookers bait-and-switched Sullivan, initially attaching to the end of the fishhook a promise of a one-on-one sitdown on the issue of race relations, and switching that admittedly unappealing lure to something even worse: a Bill Maher-style struggle session with two smug hard-left guests and a mob of hooting leftist nincompoops.

Place to one side the obvious observation that any self-respecting fish would turn up its nares at the initially proffered inducement. Why, what could be more alluring than the chance to talk race with Jon Stewart?

The real problem here is not that the show encapsulates why I think Jon Stewart is a smug a-hole, although it does that in a thorough and conclusive fashion. The real problem is bigger than one snide, self-righteous, unfunny “comedian” who styles himself a Deep Thinker. The real problem is that the show is a perfect example of a more widespread problem with our discourse.

Excerpt from behind the paywall:

Yet here is another fact that people do not understand: different races and ethnicities have different median ages. According to Brookings:

In 2019, the white median age was 43.7, compared to 29.8 for Latinos or Hispanics, 34.6 for Black residents, 37.5 for Asian Americans, and 20.9 for persons identifying as two or more races.

Forget race for a second. Would it seem shocking that a 43-year-old is more likely to have saved more money than a 34-year-old? Would you be appalled to learn that more 43-year-olds own homes than 34-year-olds? Then why would you be surprised to learn that in a group with a median age of 43-44, the median person has saved more money and is more likely to own a home than a median person from a group whose median age is 34-35?

. . . .

I do not suggest that age explains everything. I don’t think it does. Let’s touch the third rail, shall we?

The third rail is: culture.

Read it here. Subscribe here.

[guest post by Dana]

I’m wondering which Supreme Court Justices *haven’t* gone on talk shows to promote their new books:

Justice Neil Gorsuch is on "Fox & Friends" right now. The Q: How is it appropriate for a Supreme Court justice to try to goose sales of his three-month-old book by chatting on one of the most partisan shows on TV?

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 17, 2019

Of course, to Stelter, the problem isn’t Gorsuch goosing book sales, it’s that he’s a conservative Justice appearing on Fox and Friends, which everyone knows is the most Trump-friendly news/talk show around.

Anyway, I tried to locate a similar protest from Stelter when Justice Sonia Sotoymayor promoted her book Just Ask! on the not-Trump friendly Daily Show with Trevor Noah, or when she appeared on the not Trump-friendly Colbert Report to promote her autobiography, My Beloved World, and was unable to locate any similar concerns. And funny, I also couldn’t find any objection by Stelter about Justice Stephen Breyer promoting his third book, The Court and The World on the Colbert Report. Note: both Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert have made it very clear that they have no love nor respect for Trump. Neither do I, but at least I am an equal-opportunity critic of hack politicians and media outlets – no matter what side of the aisle they represent. Clearly Stelter cannot say the same about himself.

Given that Selter makes it clear that only one side of the aisle matters, while he promotes himself as a serious journalist who anchors Reliable Sources and is CNN’s chief media correspondent, why anyone would find him reliable in his reporting is beyond me. If he can’t be consistent in the small and inconsequential matters, why on earth would I think he would be any different with the weightier issues that actually matter?

Added:

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana

All it takes to ruin a guy’s vacation is one anonymous moron with a computer and a phone, and a bunch of gullible and overreacting law enforcement agents and cruise personnel:

A Nashville neurosurgeon was pulled off a Carnival cruise suspected of planning to commit a bio-terrorist attack, after a tweet from an impostor account claimed the doctor had a vial of harmful bacteria on board.

Dr. Jack Kruse was on the Carnival Magic cruise ship Sunday about to set off from a Galveston port. He planned to speak to the passengers on the 5th Annual Low-Carb Cruise Monday morning. Passengers never got to hear that lecture, though, because Kruse was escorted off the cruise after a suspicious tweet posted that morning was detected.

A cruise line official confirmed that the FBI, Homeland Security, the Galveston police and the U.S. Coast Guard were alerted about the tweet.

A tweet posted by an account “s***krusesays,” which we’ve edited because of an expletive, said, “security confiscated dynamite. talk won’t be as explosive as one at PaleoFx. still have vial of Legionnaires for epic biohack. #lccruise12.” The fake Twitter account, which parodied the doctor, has been deleted.

The story quotes Kruse as saying they ripped his room apart: “It was like being in a movie, and it was surreal . . . Having the room completely trashed, and I was asked all of these crazy questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.”

I feel you, man.

Even though the doctor was cleared of having sent the message and determined not to be a threat, the captain still didn’t let him on board. “Since the safety and well-being of my guests and crew is my number one priority, every security threat is taken seriously and fully investigated,” the captain wrote. “It is for this reason that I felt it was in the best interest of all my guests to err on the side of caution and not allow him to set sail as planned.”

Sure. Just go ahead and ruin his trip — not to mention affecting the enjoyment of people who had looked forward to hearing his talk — because of some anonymous idiot. It seems that my oft-repeated prescription not to take the word of anonymous a-holes too seriously has, once again, not been heeded.

People just loooove to take unverified crap at face value.

I have to wonder what officials were smoking to take this seriously. First of all, check out the message that caused them to go nuts. The first words were: “security confiscated dynamite.” Except, they didn’t. That could be a tip-off that the Twitter message was a joke.

Second of all: thanks to the magic of Topsy.com, we can still view some of the tweets from the “shitkrusesays” account. (I don’t have to edit profanity. Welcome to the world of grown-ups!) Check out the avatar the account holder was using:

Yes, that is Dr. Nick Riviera, the laughable quack from The Simpsons.

If this guy wanted to scream “satire!” he couldn’t do it any louder than with that avatar.

And check out another tweet about the cruise that the hoaxster sent out about the same time: “cruise ship staff refusing to keep hot tubs at 55 degrees. forcing them to watch tedx talk on my ipad. jaws are dropping. #LCCRUISE12.” I hope they thoroughly investigated that allegation as well!!!!!

I’ll give authorities this: the story reports that, “[i]n addition to the tweet, however, the cruise line received a call from a ‘Lance,’ who claimed the doctor had a plan to perform a viral biohack on the ship.”

OK. Arguably, one could contend that is enough to search his belongings to make sure he was not going to KILL EVERYONE ON BOARD!!!! (I’m not sure I agree, frankly, but I can see people making the argument.) But once everything was searched, and they had a chance to Google “Nick Riviera,” and determine that no dynamite had already been confiscated, they should have known better.

I hope that law enforcement catches “Lance” and throws his ass in jail. Based on personal experience, however, I advise Kruse not to hold his breath. I speak from personal experience when I say that law enforcement can be stunningly, spectacularly incompetent on issues like this, depending on who you get. It’s the luck of the draw, and if your detective or FBI agent is the lazy one, or the dishonest one, or the stupid one — or, God help you, all three (it happens, believe me) — you are up the creek, pal.

Best wishes to Dr. Kruse on finding the bad guys.

Well, that’s not exactly what Judge Stephen Reinhardt said, in an opinion joined by Chief Judge Kozinski. What he said, instead, is that language most of us would construe as a threat . . . isn’t a threat.

I’m not a fan of the dissent by Judge Kim Wardlaw, but she at least does a better job of fully setting forth the facts:

In the wee hours of the morning of October 22, 2008, Mr. Bagdasarian, under the user name “californiaradial,” joined a Yahoo! Finance — American International Group message board, an internet site on which members of the public could post messages concerning financial matters, AIG, and other hot topics of the day. Californiaradial’s first posting about candidate Obama, at 1:00 a.m., was to the “thread” headed “re: Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran favor Obama 100 to 0,” where he said “blow up all the mother fkers, please carpet bomb the middle east . . . give me the switch, no prob, thump and poof sand niggar.”

Two minutes later on the same thread he posted: “I would really lose no sleep if middle morons gone . . . nuke bombing . . . .” At 1:15 a.m., under another thread with the subject header “OBAMA,” he posted the first of the two threats charged in the indictment: “fk the niggar, he will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” Six minutes after that, Californiaradial combined his pro-bomb and anti-Obama rhetoric in another post on the “OBAMA” thread: “yea, the honest people have NO guns and the scum bags, niggars and drug fks do, thanx obombhaaaaa.” He reiterated his racist animus on a thread referencing Obama’s Irish heritage: “full monkey, hey can you crank the music box, I wanna see the puppet monkey dance . . . .” Four minutes later, at 1:26 a.m. he added, “a lepraaaaaaniggggggggamuch? blank that one, yahoo a-holes.” At 1:35 a.m., Californiaradial created his own antiObama thread, under the subject header “shoot the nig.”

There he posted the second threat charged in the indictment: “country fkd for another 4 years+, what nig has done ANYTHING right???? long term???? never in history, except sambos.” At this point, the other message board participants reacted to the serious nature of Californiaradial’s threats. “Dan757x” immediately responded on the “shoot the nig” thread: “You’ve been reported by me, a good ole’ white boy.” “Freddie226” weighed in to support Dan, who next posted: “I hope everyone reports this type of garbage.” Under the same thread, “Sniper1agent” posted: “Be advised Federal Law Enforcement is monitoring . . . ,” and “Brown.romaine” advised: “I am reporting this post to the Secret Service.” And, in fact, John Base, a retired Air Force officer who saw Californiaradial’s “shoot the nig” message did report the threats to the Los Angeles Field Office of the United States Secret Service because, as set forth in the Stipulated Facts, he was “concerned that the posting threatened harm to Barack Obama.”

In response, a Secret Service agent searched the message board, located the “shoot the nig” posting, and also discovered the “50 cal in the head” posting. From Yahoo!, the Secret Service obtained the IP address for the user registered as “californiaradial,” and it used that information to get subscriber data from Cox Communications. This trail of bread crumbs led the Secret Service to La Mesa, California, and, on November 21, 2008, agents appeared at Californiaradial’s doorstep.

They discovered that, in the real world, the user known as “californiaradial” in cyberspace was Mr. Bagdasarian. Mr. Bagdasarian admitted to posting the “fk the nig” and “50 cal in the head” message from his home computer. When asked, he stated that he had weapons in his home. A search warrant executed a few days later revealed that Mr. Bagdasarian possessed six firearms, including a Remington model 700 ML .50 caliber muzzle-loading rifle. Agents also discovered .50 caliber ammunition in Mr. Bagdasarian’s home. The agents searched Mr. Bagdasarian’s computer, where they discovered a November 4, 2008, email message from Mr. Bagdasarian to an associate with the foreboding subject line “Re: And so it begins.” The email stated, “Pistol??? Dude, Josh needs to get us one of these, just shoot the nigga’s car and POOF!” The email then provided a link to a photograph of a rifle on a Barrett Rifles website. A second email that Mr. Bagdasarian sent the same day under the same subject line stated, “Pistol . . . plink plink plink Now when you use a 50 cal on a nigga car you get this.” The email then directed the reader to a YouTube video of a car being blown up.

Now who hasn’t done that? In the exercise of their constitutional rights to free speech?

So what is Reinhardt’s theory? The essence of his argument: the above language is not threatening:

Neither statement constitutes a threat in the ordinary meaning of the word: “an expression of an intention to inflict . . . injury . . . on another.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 2382 (1976). The “Obama fk the niggar” statement is a prediction that Obama “will have a 50 cal in the head soon.” It conveys no explicit or implicit threat on the part of Bagdasarian that he himself will kill or injure Obama. Nor does the second statement impart a threat. “[S]hoot the nig” is instead an imperative intended to encourage others to take violent action, if not simply an expression of rage or frustration. The threat statute, however, does not criminalize predictions or exhortations to others to injure or kill the President.

So, apparently, if I say “Hey everyone! Shoot Stephen Reinhardt! I predict he is going to get a .22 slug in his head soon” — and I am found to have a .22, and have several private e-mails where I joke about the effect that .22 caliber weapons have on the heads of liberal Ninth Circuit judges — then hey! it’s no harm no foul.

You have got to be kidding me. This is such an ivory tower decision, it’s stunning. Apparently, Reinhardt would look at the protection racket occurring at 1:45 of this Monty Python sketch, and see two guys genuinely concerned about the well being of the British Army:

Fires happen. Things burn. N-word presidents get shot by the caliber of weapon I happen to own. Nothing threatening here. No, sir. Not at all.

Sheesh.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Vice President Joe Biden is known for his tendency to misspeak but, in a post entitled “Clinton decides that Hamas controls Ramallah,” Carl in Jerusalem shows that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is doing her best to catch up:

“Hillary Clinton has given her speech to the AIPAC conference. You can find the full transcript here (8-page pdf). The headline of this post came in the middle of this speech. It is nothing short of astounding that Clinton is so misinformed (or is she lying?) that she believes Hamas was behind the dedication of that square in Ramallah to mass murderer Dalal al-Mughrabi. Well, it was Fatah.
***
What a bleeping moron. Ramallah – the city that named the square after Dalal al Mughrabi – is controlled by FATAH not Hamas. Dalal al Mughrabi was a FATAH terorrist. FATAH did that dedication – not Hamas. What will it take to get through her thick skull that FATAH ARE TERRORISTS just like Hamas. They just talk more nicely.”

In an Update, Carl explains why this matters:

“I want to make it clear why it’s important that Clinton thinks that Hamas controls Ramallah.

The Obama administration, like every US administration since Bill Clinton’s, is incapable of admitting that Fatah is a terror organization. Only a terror organization would have honored a terrorist like Dalal al-Mughrabi, who was responsible for the murder of 37 Israeli civilians (including 13 children) and one American civilian and the wounding of hundreds of others in what is known as the “Coastal Road massacre.”

So in Clinton’s mind, since Fatah is not a terror organization, Fatah could not have honored al-Mughrabi. So it must be Hamas.

The implications for the ‘peace process’ – the fact that the United States refuses to recognize that it is trying to deal with a terror organization and is asking Israel to make peace with a terror organization – ought to be obvious.”

Carl also points out other discrepancies in Clinton’s statements, such as Clinton’s claim that President Obama’s “commitment to Israel’s security and Israel’s future is rock solid.” Here’s what “rock solid” sounded like last July:

“Obama, according to participants, said his approach would build more credibility with Arabs, and he criticized the Bush administration policy of unwavering agreement with Israel as ineffective.”

The relationship between Obama and Israel was already strained following a dispute over Israeli construction in Jerusalem, and now there is a report Obama has invited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to a meeting at the White House tomorrow. I’d like to be a fly on that wall.

H/T GatewayPundit.

— DRJ

It’s literally 10 seconds from this:

It’s a real setback — not because there’s anything wrong with the science, but because the character assassination and the temperature of the debate which you can just see from our colleague in America is just obscuring the important issue, which is: has the world warmed in the last 100 years or not?

to this:

What an asshole.

Good stuff. As usual, via Hot Air.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Recently, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had this to say about objections to President Obama’s speech to students:

“I think we’ve reached a little bit of the silly season when the president of the United States can’t tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school.”

Similarly, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the furor over Obama’s upcoming speech to the nation’s school children is “just silly.”

Meanwhile, in March, Obama appointed Van Jones to serve as his Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation (the Green Jobs Czar) despite the fact that Jones became an avowed Communist in the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King incident and founded an activist group called STORM that is based on Marxism and Leninism. More recently, Jones reportedly signed a 911 Truther Statement in 2004 and in February 2009 referred to Republicans (without abbreviation) as “a-holes.”

And the Obama Administration thinks conservatives are silly.

— DRJ

UPDATE: The LA Times Tim Rutten goes beyond silly to paranoia:

“Anxiety over the speech seems particularly high in Texas, where many districts are offering parents involved in the boycott movement the option of taking their children out of class. (Whoever thought we’d see Texas treat advocacy of personal responsibility like sex education?)

The irony wasn’t lost on everybody in the state. Puzzled Texas education officials told the Houston Chronicle that students often watch presidential speeches broadcast during school hours and that, in 1989, President George H.W. Bush specifically spoke to students about drug abuse. “It’s hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than attacking the president of the United States for talking to students about the importance of getting a good education and being a good citizen,” said Kathy Miller, president of a statewide school monitoring group. “I wish our elected leaders were responsible enough to denounce this kind of wild-eyed paranoia. But the problem is too many of them are actually feeding this kind of nonsense — like when the governor flirts with secessionists and state Board of Education members say the president sympathizes with terrorists.”

Miller has identified precisely the process at work in the healthcare hysteria and, increasingly, elsewhere where the GOP thinks it can shove the Obama administration into a ditch. Republican officials such as the Florida state chairman are playing a dangerous game with an unhinged segment of public opinion that regards Obama not as an elected official with whom they disagree, but as an illegitimate usurper of the presidency.

That paranoid fantasy is what’s really behind the “birther” movement and the allegations that the president is — take your pick — a secret Marxist or a secret Muslim.

It’s the kind of fanciful anxiety that produces comments like this, posted on a conservative website this week: “Barack Obama and his left-wing Chicago machine regime are putting into place laws and institutions which will insure that there will never again be free elections in America.”

These are the people who are stockpiling ammunition and keeping their children at home next Tuesday.”

So Rutten thinks conservatives are “unhinged” and into “hysteria” and “fantasy”? How “normal” of him.

By the way, I blogged about Miller’s statement before. In addition, Miller’s biography indicates she is a community organizer and former public affairs director for Planned Parenthood of Austin. She has an agenda that the Houston Chronicle and Tim Rutten of the LA Times apparently didn’t want to share with readers:

“Kathy believes in the tremendous strength of the grassroots and has spent her career focused on mobilizing support for important issues such as women’s reproductive freedom, children’s health care, public education and ending partner violence. Kathy has trained thousands of individuals from Texas and across the nation on media relations, grassroots organizing and mobilizing to combat radical-right political extremism.”

— DRJ