"Insipid?" Insidious, rather.

The most moronic part of the lie is this: If you email the White House with a rumor you've heard, YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY WHERE YOU HEARD IT!!! "Hey, some schmuck at work told me a public option will mean my small business will result in a leprechaun kicking me in the nuts on a daily basis, is that true?" is not the same as "John Doe, who lives at 123 Any Street in Townsville East Dakota, and who drives a blue Camaro license plate FATLVR and whose phone number is 555-5555, HE says a public option..."

Republicans who believe this horse hockey are Republicans who WANT to believe this horse hockey.

Okay - not that I would want these folks to be fools & idiots, but its better for my digestion to think that they are just stupid.

Rather than the depraved,vile jerks that they trully are.

Sigh...

an attack that originated as a transparently stupid far-right blog post has now garnered a response for the spokesperson for the President of the United States.

The Republican noise machine is in rare form these days. And jaw-droppingly effective.

Oh and John Cornyn is the biggest, baddest, dishonest liar there is.

This is a flagrant attempt to intimidate BHO's opponents by threatening them with a one-way ticket to the Kenyan gulag.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that the right wing is accusing the Obama administration of all the things that the Bush administration, the GOP, and the right wing media all tried to do during the last eight years?

It is kind of brilliant to turn an attempt to fight stupid conspiracy theories into a stupid conspiracy theory, though. (Warning: people denying the existence of robots may be robots themselves.)

Of course the White House is collecting names!

They have to start somewhere to compile a list of persons to be arrested by their ACORN agents and put into FEMA internment camps for reeducation!

Any efforts to refute these charges is just part of the coverup by Obama!

We are still waiting for someone to disprove the evidence provided in the past, by the distinguished Congressman Dan Burton, that Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster with a lesbian bullet!

if they did take names it'd be a good way to -- as joseph hussein stalin usta say -- "clean out the dead wood."

but, hey, it's your projection, al, not mine...

Asked about Cornyn's letter on Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, "nobody is collecting names."

I can hear my in-laws now, "Well, of course he would say that!"

"I suspect all of these far-right activists and lawmakers were well aware of reality, but ran with the lie because it served their purposes -- in this case, to deceive their base and generate more rage."

What?! You think the GOP is led by cynical liars who feign outrage to manipulate the rubes? Since when? Does Frank Luntz know? Or Bill Kristol? What about Karl Rove?

Look, surely, some of the gomers really do believe the shit they puke out -- but you literally have to have been brain dead for the past 40 years to think that the nice folks behind the Southern Strategy don't actually know what they're doing when they say that shit. This is really your most annoying feature Steve -- it's like naivete, but combined with a level of obtuseness that's almost impossible to break through.

Let's laugh at Jake Tapper,
'Cause he's too cool for school,
Which is par for the course
For a tool and a fool.

Never thought I'd say this, but Tapper actually makes me wistful for the days when Sam Donaldson was ABC's chief White House correspondent.

I really wish the Administration would stop treating Fox employees as journalists. I'll bet there are plenty of reporters for small radio and TV stations and newspapers who would love the chance to get in on press conferences and briefings (maybe even bloggers).

As nutty Republican conspiracy theories go, this was even more headache-inducing than most.

Well, somebody has to be vigilant. There is a difference, though, between vigilance and assuming the worst with no evidence.

My, what a short memory. It was John Ashcroft, our former Attorney General, who advocated for a tips line:
"...tried to organize a nationwide "tips" line for mail carriers, home repairmen, delivery drivers and others whose occupations bring them in contact with the general public to report suspicious activity." (http://www.nndb.com/people/352/000022286/)

But that was okay, the people being reported on weren't real Americans.

KJ

And today, an attack that originated as a transparently stupid far-right blog post has now garnered a response for the spokesperson for the President of the United States.

But the stupid far-right bloggers (and the republican operatives) won't pay any attention to the answer. These things never seem to go away.

I'm really worried about what is happening to our country when right-wingers are doing all they can to tear it asunder. I'm afraid we may never recover.

And today, an attack that originated as a transparently stupid far-right blog post has now garnered a response for the spokesperson for the President of the United States.

Translation: It's still true that virtually any right-winger in America can demand that any Democrat -- even a Democratic president of the United States -- beg for permission before doing something, and the demand will have to be taken seriously because the wingnut will be backed up by the entire conservative movement.

In other words, right-wingers still frun this country.

What gets me is that, on this issue and others, the wingnut base think they're protecting themselves. They think they're tough-minded, on-the-ball, and so forth. (I don't know what Cornyn believes.) But an outside observer sees extreme vulnerability of a type that inspires contempt. Hyperbolic though I am, as years pass I still fail to underestimate these people.

run

Al: "This is a flagrant attempt to intimidate BHO's opponents by threatening them with a one-way ticket to the Kenyan gulag."

(Sigh!) Oh, Al, if only that were really the case in your particular case ...

I can just see Al, plucked from home and wisked into the night, airdropped into Kijabe Station in central Kenya, where he's forced to run barefoot across the Great Rift Valley, chased by a herd of angry wildebeests and Kikuyu warriors armed only with spears - oops, make that a looped recording of Britney Spears' "Toxic" - while back in D.C., the wicked Obama watches via TV monitor, wrings his hands insessantly and laughs maniacally like Snidely Whiplash on some really good acid.

Tell you what I'll do.

Someone provide the funds and I'll happily set up a website to collect the reports, collate them, extract the names and sources, and report the collated data on the Internet for anyone to see. Then I'd probably sell the identified individual names to offset the supplied funds.

Purely private enterprise, you understand.

Detailed business plan to be created and provided to serious potential funders.

My point, of course, is that if it can be done on the Internet, private business is already doing it. Does anyone seriously think we have any privacy here?

Steve M.: "run"

Okay. Just tell me where, and from whom.

Let's see, the White House is either:

A. Trying to get an early warning on viral attacks on the health care plan so they can crank up their quick response team.

Or,

B. Trying to assemble a vast list of all the wing-nut lunatics in the country so they can be dealt with (i.e. perhaps euthanized under the new health care bill).

Sorry, but if you take off your tin foil hat and just think about it the answer is obvious.

Dear Republicans,

Hasn't anyone ever told you that: "We always fear most in others, what we hate most in ourselves?"

L&K,
The Progressives

When Bush put out the TIPS plan:

Read about it here

Cornyn said:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

What hypocrites. But we knew that.

Man, this is getting old.

Trying to assemble a vast list of all the wing-nut lunatics in the country

There's not a scroll big enough.

as per usual with the gaggle of republican idiots spouting faux outrage/nonsense, it comes down to one word: "projection."

This is really your most annoying feature Steve -- it's like naivete, but combined with a level of obtuseness that's almost impossible to break through.
Posted by: Jay B.

Give Steve a break. He's finally using the word "lying." Normally he'd say "dissembling," "misleading," telling "half-truths" or "falsehoods." Baby steps.

Peg: Al is a parody troll. He's been here since the days of Kevin Drum. It's best to just ignore him.

@ jay b : i've always read steve's [feigned] naivete as "schtick." but what do i know? [other than it really annoys some of his regulars....]

"Last night, Krauthammer said this is a Hugh Chavez-like effort."

His friends call him Hugo.

If you're defending, you're losing. If Cornyn says Obama is collecting people's names, and Robert Gibbs says "we're not taking names", it becomes a he-said-she-said thing . Making polite, restrained statements about "misinformation" aren't going to dispel the rumors, they need to be attacking Cornyn for lying.

Sorry to break ranks, folks, but I think Steve is wrong on this one.

If Bush did this same kind of thing, none of us would like it one bit. Be honest - you know you'd find it creepy:

If anybody sends you an email questioning why we need the PATRIOT Act, forward their email to us at the Bush White House and we'll take care of it.

That wouldnt be a problem for you? Really?

The WH screwed this up. They should have made it clear that they were attempting to collect *misinformation*, not the identities of people who spread the misinformation.

Plus, why on earth does the WH need this anyway? Cant they just turn on the TV, listen to the radio, and look on the internet to see what the misinformation is out there? What's to be gained by having people email in "fishy" stuff?

This was a bad idea badly handled.

TG Chicago,
"...you know you'd find it creepy: "If anyone sends you an email questioning why we need the PATRIOT Act, forward their email to us at the Bush White House and we'll take care of it."
The only people who think that the occupants of the White House (past or present) are omnipotent Masters of the Universe simply waiting to show off their awesome powers by squelching some puny opponent, are already wearing tinfoil hats; probably even while watching "24" (maybe it helps with the reception?). Those people have, well I was going to say 'a government to run', but that obviously didn't apply to GWB. How about this instead; if the Bush White House had been that effective, Jeb Bush would now be president and the twins would be running for the next vacant Senate seats.
And they'd win.

Yeah, Steve, time to sharpen up the spelling etc. - and spellchecker isn't going to flag "Hugh" - that requires intelligent human intervention, which you are able to do.

This was a bad idea badly handled.

This was a good idea correctly handled, and one that they performed effectively and without incident during the campaign. Find out what the misinformation out there is, bring it into the light, make an effort to rebut it. It's just this time the Republicans decided to start lying about it. If they'd handled the program differently it wouldn't have mattered, the Republicans were responding to the imaginary program in their mind and that imaginary program wouldn't have been any less nasty and draconian if the real-world program looked different.

Screamin' Demon: "Peg: Al is a parody troll. He's been here since the days of Kevin Drum. It's best to just ignore him."

I know that, dear. And obviously, you took my retort about angry wildebeeasts far too seriously to recognize that I'm also playing for cheap laughs, and it's probably best to just ignore me, too. But thank you for your concern.

Steve Benen is a tool of the fascist left.

Of course federal law requires that the White House *not* delete emails that it receives, so yes, the White House is in fact collecting names.

The real issue here is that the post on whitehouse.gov doesn't say why it wants the info- it just says to send it in. From there political assumptions take over- those who support Obama and his administration will of course see positive motives in this situation. The author of the article says "The very idea that the White House would be "collecting names" is about as legitimate as the idea that the president is a not a natural-born citizen." What is the evidence for this? Is it as if governments, the US government included, have never overstepped privacy boundaries? Then on the other hand, the "wing nuts" of course assume the worst concerning everything Obama does- are we surprised? But all of these assumptions distract from serious concerns and questions: is it really wise for the White House to ask people to forward emails they've received or report conversations they've had? Especially without detailing their motives? Is "the White House" (to use a very generic and overused collective) really that out of touch with it's opponents that it can't predict the right-wing reaction?

Anyway, I think this is definitely more of a gaffe on the part of the White House than anything else. But nonetheless, I think it is a bad idea: even if it's not the actual motive, it is too easily perceived as a "snitch line." And in truth, all of that data will be in the white house email system and cannot be legally deleted.

And by the way- I didn't like Bush or the Patriot Act either.