This is what passes for Republican thought these days. It's hard to justify voting for Bush/Cheney/McCain unless the Democrats are worse than Satan.

That's why Kevin's headline is accurate. We're about to get six more months of this.

Hmmm... let me think of Democrats who I think would not have screwed up as badly as George Bush did in office... hmmm... I know!: Al Sharpton. Dennis Kucinich. Any of the Baldwin Brothers. Rev. Wright. Any former member of the Weather Underground probably wouldn't be too bad either.

I am a liberal to moderate Democrat and the idea of a big Democratic majority really scares me.

I fear it won't be big enough to get univeral health care but it will be big enough to do serious damage in other places.

I hope I am wrong

Hmmmmm. Soylent Green.

How come every day somebody talks about nuking Iran - is this like the Saddam/Al Qaeda crap.

keep repeating the idea enough and you will get buy in ?

Funny. Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley were Republicans during the Hoover administration.

I kid you not.

Remember, though, Barnett is predicating his statement on the idea that a Dem President wouldn't engage *enough* with the outside world. TPMB's hedgehog is the whole "core/gap" conceit, and he thinks the only way to successfully deal with "gap" countries is to give them incentives to enter the "core" structure, which means, in part, trade deals.

On the other hand, the idea that not passing CAFTA is worse than nuking Iran *is* crazy. It's just more overstatement than NRO-quality craziness.

This Barnett toad works for Enterra Solutions. This corporation makes money getting corporations to dump American workers and pick up outsourcing.

In other words, they are economic traitors to American workers. Very standard Repukeliscum of course.

That's preposterous. As everyone knows, soylent green is... PEOPLE, and no self-respecting democrats consider babies to be people.

With Dems in control, how can the GOP shut down the government and blame them for not giving us healthcare reform or refocusing the War on Terror on terrorists?

Not all the babies. The cuter ones, we'd breed into a super race of gays.

Treatin human beings with dignity and respect is a crime compared to melting people.

The banality of evil? I think so.

Wow, Barnett is channeling Dan Quayle!
http://www.dailyhowler.com/h071200_1.shtml

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 25, 2008; 11:43 AM

The nation's top military officer said today that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" against Iran, criticizing what he called the Tehran government's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be "extremely stressing" but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Question: Do we really have an endless supply of our own dicks we can step on?

The Republicans know their base are emotional knee jerk reactionists. And grape_crush is correct: The act was pioneered by Senator Reed Smoot, a Republican from Utah, and Representative Willis C. Hawley, a Republican from Oregon. President Herbert Hoover had asked Congress for a downward revision in rates, but Congress raised rates instead. -wiki

And what does Pat Buchanan think of Smoot-Hawley?
Its a myth!!
The 1929 collapse on Wall Street triggered the Great Depression. The failure of thousands of banks, wiping out a third of America's savings, caused the Depression to last until WWII, long after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs had been rolled back. -Buchanan

Its just more pundit poppycock.

http://www.buchanan.org/pa-94-1203.html

"but it will be big enough to do serious damage in other places."

And those other places would be, what, precisely?

The "other places" are presumably Cambridge + American bicycle enthusiasts:

The smoot is a nonstandard unit of length created as part of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot (class of 1962), an MIT fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
One smoot is equal to his height (five feet and seven inches ~1.70 m), and the bridge's length was measured to be 364.4 smoots (620.1 m) plus or minus one ear, with the "plus or minus" intended to express uncertainty of measurement. Over the years the "or minus" portion has gone astray in many citations, including the commemorative plaque at the site itself. Smoot repeatedly lay down on the bridge, let his companions mark his new position in chalk or paint, and then got up again. Eventually, he tired from all this exercise and was thereafter carried by the fraternity brothers to each new position. Everyone walking across the bridge today sees painted markings indicating how many smoots there are from where the sidewalk begins on the Boston river bank. The marks are repainted each year by the incoming associate member class (similar to pledge class) of Lambda Chi Alpha.
Markings typically appear every 10 smoots, but additional marks appear at other numbers in between. For example, the 70-smoot mark is omitted in favor of a mark for 69. The 182.2-smoot mark is accompanied by the words "Halfway to Hell" and an arrow pointing towards MIT. The markings have become well-accepted by the public, to the point that during the bridge renovations that occurred in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department requested that the markings be maintained, since they had become useful for identifying the location of accidents on the bridge. [wiki]

The Hawley Company is a leading U.S. bicycle parts and accessories distributor.

Six months? What are you worried about? It's only 1 Friedman Unit. I am totally confident we'll even know which Democratic candidate has the nomination by then.

Wanted: The Right Kind of Imperialist.

The Washington Class is for wealth accumulation. They are not for good government or equal opportunity or fairness. All these things will come, they tell us, if we have the best scheme for wealth accumulation. Indeed these other concerns are not real concerns at all. If it is encouraging immigration to lower the price of labor, or shipping industry to China to reduce the cost of production or invasion and occupation of other people's countries to secure markets and resources. Imperialism is not conquering for fun, although it was that too, it is about creating free markets for wealth accumulation for the few at home. The national military is a tool for private wealth accumulation. The rich have convinced the political establishment that their interests are the national interest.

We now witnesses the results of this vision; good times for the few and hard times for the many. It comes as no surprise given the same policies a century ago during the last Gilded Age gave us the same results.

Wanted: The Right Kind of Imperialist.

The Washington Class is for wealth accumulation. They are not for good government or equal opportunity or fairness. All these things will come, they tell us, if we have the best scheme for wealth accumulation. Indeed these other concerns are not real concerns at all. If it is encouraging immigration to lower the price of labor, or shipping industry to China to reduce the cost of production or invasion and occupation of other people's countries to secure markets and resources. Imperialism is not conquering for fun, although it was that too, it is about creating free markets for wealth accumulation for the few at home. The national military is a tool for private wealth accumulation. The rich have convinced the political establishment that their interests are the national interest.

We now witnesses the results of this vision; good times for the few and hard times for the many. It comes as no surprise given the same policies a century ago during the last Gilded Age gave us the same results.

We'll get to the bottom of this strawberry theft. I kid you not.

-- Captain Queeg

In spite of all their panic mongering, you have to take a deep breath and ask yourself one important question. Has one of these clueless jack-nuts been right about ANYTHING for the past 7 1/2 years?

People who have been constantly batting zero are still trying to tell us how to play the game. Go figure.

The other day the Republicans in the Senate stopped the common sense correction of the activist Supreme Court's gutting of the law guaranteeing equal pay for equal work. We need more Democrats in the US Senate. We need fewer Republican ideologues who fail to understand that Americans deserve to be treated fairly by their employers. I look forward to a period where Democrats have total control of the government. We need a balance for the last eight years. If the Democrats overreach, well they can still be voted out.

if you're a republican, it's reasonable to argue that mccain might make a better president than either obama or clinton or any other democrat for that matter. he is your standard-bearer, after all (good luck!) but to argue that having the democrats in charge would be a disaster is laughable after the damage that republican majorities and the administration of george w."i make franklin pierce look great" bush have inflicted over the last eight years.

If Republicans hadn't fucked things up so badly they would probably be able to hold on to some part of the government.

"i make franklin pierce look great"

Funny you should mention that. Chimpy is related to Pierce on his mother's side. He's just following his family's tradition of screwing up everything they touch.

We do better with split government.

The modern conservative cares more about making a few more greenbacks than the incineration of thousands of innocent human beings. How deviant and sick can these people be? I don't know enough about Mr. Barnett to judge, but if he is really serious with his comment, then he is one sick puppy.

As I have said time and time again on this forum, "free trade" does not equal "fair trade". Why should Americans have to or want to compete with Chinese or Indonesian labor when many "laborers" there are nothing more than slaves? When they have no environmental laws and dump raw sewage and dangerous chemical, untreated, into the water, air and earth? When they work twelve hour shifts six days a week in appalling conditions? When many of the "laborers" are children as young as eight years old? This isn't "free trade".

Conservatives like to use ambiguous words like "free" and "liberty", becasue it is hard to argue with nice-sounding words like that. Look beneath the surface and see the ugliness and deviancy and you will realize those words don't apply at all. Sick, deviant trade is more like it.

*

"I fear it won't be big enough to get universal health care but it will be big enough to do serious damage in other places."

This is our typical dumb shit voter. They all say the same thing, government completely fucks up unless my program is funded. It is what makes for instability, simple introspective logic is missing in the voter.

When do we get to turn them gay? After we take their guns and force them to ride the bus? Or before we outlaw religion? Because honey, I can't wait.

Wasn't Barnett one of these people feted by "decent, realistic" Dems a few years ago when The New Map of the Pentagon came out? He was certainly speaking at lefty-style conferences like PopTech.

Personally I never understood WTF the adulation was about. He seemed to me, even back them, to be propounding dangerously America uber Alles type views.

All this post shows us is that, I guess, he's ridden the bipartisan train as far as it can go, but got to the point where he simply can't hide his true nature any longer.

mhr,

Good point. You forgot that Lady Bird started the anti-litter (don't be a litterbug!) campaign. Typical meddling do-gooder liberals. Why in my day there was no litter because the poor collected it to insulate their shanty towns and they LIKED it! Lady Bird wanted us to pick up our OWN litter! Stupid liberal egalitarian crap if you ask me.

I don't read The Corner much, but it is hard to imagine much that anyone is consistently able to write stupider stuff than that.

The Washington Class is for wealth accumulation.

Market capitalization is God's Will.

more destabilizing than nuking Iran? Hillbilly and Obama would team up with a Dem congress to nuke China, Russia, India, and Pakistan? I had no idea.

Stalin is making more and more sense to me these days. I can't wait for the left to get a hold of the reins of the American Gulag and the unified executive, and these guys start getting rendered and tendered.

I agree with the Right. Fuck the rule of law. It's as quaint as the Geneva Conventions. All there is is power. This guy may not yet rise to the level of an unlawful combatant, but he's sounding an awful lot like a material witness, doncha think?

The right has totally lost its fear of the left. Fear can be a friend of considered discourse. I think our discourse could improve considerably if former admin officials started getting involuntarily extradited to jurisdictions where they could face war crimes prosecutions and conservative commentators feared inhuman and unjust violence of the state and the mob. Being an ignorant, provocative asshole might be a lot less rewarding and enticing.

A totalitarian American left would be briefly refreshing, before blossoming into a monster in its own particular idiom. Might be worth it just to see the American right truly crushed, to see their nightmares realized, and the high brought low. Hippies on bad acid with machetes hauling pundits from their traffic-bound hummers, profiteers stripped of assets and clothes waterboarded in rows, alternating with midlevel republican activists, functionaries of the CPA kicked bound and jingling out of the gates of the green zone like the stooly in Stalag 17...

ahh, to dream...

I don't think this can be emphasized enough: Smoot-Hawley was written by two Republicans and signed into law by Herbert Hoover, a Republican. The Democrats were the ones who came up with the New Deal and actually, you know, relieved the Depression.

Fascinating that he can look at a completely Republican-owned disaster and say, "Oh my God, we can't possibly put the Democrats in charge or they'll pass something like this Republican disaster."

Mnemosyne,

Compartmentalized minds have absolutely no problem with cognitive dissonance. To them "Good things come to he who waits" and "The early bird gets the worm" are both true.

It really is amazing and I don't mean in a good way.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the guy who wrote that infamous Esquire article that tried to promote his hero, Admiral William F. Fallon, as "The Man Between War and Peace," and instead got Fallon fired. Apparently Barnett is not very good at predicting real world consequences.

I am a liberal to moderate Democrat and the idea of a big Democratic majority really scares me.

--neil wilson

You're scared because, as you've proven over at The Carpetbagger Report time and again, you're not actually a Democrat. You're a concern troll who claims to be a Democrat while going around and attacking, questioning and railing against every single thing the Democrats do.

That's not to say Democrats are above reproach -- they definitely deserve a lot of the criticism they receive from fellow Democrats.

But you're not a fellow Democrat, as you've proven repeatedly on several blogs. It'd be better if you just admitted it, since you've been exposed as a fraud countless times.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2187rank.html

Ugh! One needs hip waders to get through all the troll poop on this thread!

bellumregio >"...The national military is a tool for private wealth accumulation. The rich have convinced the political establishment that their interests are the national interest...."

hmmmmm

Now where have I heard about that before ? Some French guy I think.

"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor." - Voltaire

Uh, daCascadian, do you not know how the ad hominem attack works? You should, at the very least, be giving us a quote from someone who has actually been discredited --- Hitler, Marx, George W Bush.

How exactly does giving us a quote from Voltaire (who turns out to have been correct in most of his observations) weaken bellumregio's claims?

Soylent Green...

...IS PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooo!

Oh the humanity!

(Sorry. Somebody on the left had to counterbalance those histrionics on the other side.)

(And somebody had to make that reference.)

I like it. Six more months of this out-of-the-woodwork insanity/inanity, led flag flying by anger management poster boy McCain't backed to the hilt by his disabled minions. I smell the sweet odeur of spontaneous combustion.

Writing a book for the mentally insane, Mr. Thomas P.M. Barnett?

...more damaging to world stability than even nuking Iran?

Certainly, you can see why the Repug party has become the incredible shrinking Party of our time. WHO wants to be associated with the hideous maggots crawling out of the woodwork in final pulse of Bushims.

Sickness likes a cancer grows, Jeebus, and here we thought "liberal" was a bad word. It's all a showcase on how the Bush adminisration is a sickness, every bit as sick as Hilter was too.

I guess he can't compete with K-Lo in the dumb quote department, but Thomas P.M. Barnett is sure giving her a run for her money:

Why bring us dumb quotes when you could bring an attempt to make sense of the Democratic view on NAFTA? While the U.S. exports manufactured goods to Canada and Mexico, and imports oil from them, does anybody believe that renegotiating the treaty now (with oil at $120/barrel and continuing to increase) is a good idea? And are Obama and Clinton lying about what they really want to attempt?

Exaggeration aside, the Democratic position on NAFTA looks almost as bad as Smoot-Hawley.

On the whole, worse even than killing off the new treaty with Colombia.

"While the U.S. exports manufactured goods to Canada and Mexico, and imports oil from them, does anybody believe that renegotiating the treaty now (with oil at $120/barrel and continuing to increase) is a good idea?"

1) Oil is going to keep increasing in price no matter what anyone does.

2) Since when are we afraid of re-negotiating our trade agreements with the likes of Canada and Mexico ? If something is wrong with the agreements that is a negative for the US, then I would consider it a grave disservice to our country *not* to re-negotiate, regardless of the situation. Our trade balance in 2007 with Mexico was a negative 74 billion, and negative 64 billion with Canada.

3) Why are Republicans like yourself always so concerned about mere minutiae like this when the giant economic clusterfucks that your party is responsible for go completely unnoticed ? Or are you somehow going to claim that Bush and your party haven't run the economy and our military into a ditch ?

" ... Any of the Baldwin Brothers."

Except Stephen. He's a Republicrat.

"We do better with split government."

I agree, unless the Republicrats hold part of it. I'd say we're in for a "split" government for quite a while since Bush the Lesser stacked the Supreme Court.

Dems won't steal your babies. They'll forcibly abort them for production of Soylent Green. That's the whole purpose of legalized abortion, after all. Get with the program, Kevin!

It might help for people to remember that Barnett usually opposes war with Iran. His point here is, if Iran gets nuked, the damage is limited to Iran and areas downwind thereof. But if we abandon free trade, we and everybody we trade with suffers--that is, most of the world.

.

Barnett's comparison to nuking Iran is overblown. Still, his point is well taken; that Obama's economic populism has the potential to do long term damage to the American economy as well as the fortunes of a lot of developing countries.

Rejecting trade deals, rescinding NAFTA, a Windfall Profits Tax on oil....maybe this stuff is all just empty campaign. But what if it is not?

Appears a lot of people are basing their support for Obama on the belief that he really doesn't mean what he says.

.