From today's Washington Post "Tuesday's Opinions" e-mailby KenIf I told you that I didn't bother to click through to the specimen of op-ed illumination promised by the above e-blurb, and merely waved it at you saying "See? See?," you would probably say, "Well, sure, that's dumber than dirt, but it probably doesn't represent what that noted far-right-wing sage Marc A. Thiessen really wrote or, you know, oversimplifies it." (As if everything MAT writes didn't come to us presimplified down to the single-cell-life-form level.)So I clicked through, and you know what? What the simple one actually says is if anything dumber. To wit:
President Obama’s immigration address was profoundly moving and deeply cynical. Obama spoke of the plight of illegal immigrants who struggle in the shadows to build a better life for their kids and of his desire to “work with both parties” to find a solution. If Obama really believed a single word of that, he would not have taken unconstitutional executive action that he knows will kill any chances for reform.Obama is not acting to help illegal immigrants. He is acting to provoke the GOP. The giveaway moment in Obama’s address was when he told Republicans that “Americans are tired of gridlock” and urged them not to “let a disagreement over a single issue be a deal breaker on every issue. That’s not how our democracy works, and Congress certainly shouldn’t shut down our government again just because we disagree on this.” . . .
You're welcome to pursue this on your own if you like: "Obama's cynical immigration ploy." But whatever one may think of the president's planned executive action on immigration, it's simply impossible for anyone with a working brain to say with any degree of sincerity that the purpose of the president's initiative is "to provoke Republicans." (On the simplest, most literal level, it would be a simply imbecilic idea, only likely to occur to someone who's not only an imbecile but an imbecile of a particularly paranoid and savage variety, such that from the fetid muck of your pre-brain might arise a pre-thought along the lines: "Leastwise that's what I'd fuckin' do if someone fuckin' put me in fuckin' charge of some fuckin' thing.")I threw in the "with any degree of sincerity" to cover the possibility that Marc T isn't really that stupid -- is it even humanly possible to be that stupid? -- and rather is, for some unknown purpose, simply lying his putrid guts out. Although he has a long track record that suggests something close to a genius level at stupidity, it could instead by some sort of cunning. Perhaps it would be helpful if he began, as I've suggested in the past, by saying either "Speaking as a pathological liar" or "Speaking as a gibbering idiot." But would it make much difference?The reality is that the dope has somehow gotten this electrical impulse (I hate to dignify it by calling it an "idea") buzzing about his brain, most likely by implantation from some other ultra-right-wing zero-brain-function life form, this notion that the president "is acting to provoke the GOP," and he's by God going to keep blithering about it until his word count says it's time to stop.It's not even worth going into, say, what Marc T knows about the Constitution. The zero-brainers have implanted in his brain that this executive action is, plain and simple, unconstitutional, even though the whole pack of them put together don't know anything about the Constitution except that it's awful scratchy when you try to use it to wipe your festering stinkybutt.What's important here is to note the effect: It makes any discussion of the rights and wrongs of, and possible fixes for, immigration policy literally impossible. And there you have the whole hulking Modern American Right: "Our brains are like a fortress, and no way can you come in."And these hulking life forms loom and bluster and threaten, and there is no sentient human being to talk to. In some hard-to-quantify ratio they're people who either: (a) have no capacity to receive and process information, or (b) are at the service of masters who in one way or another command their fealty.And Benghazi to you too, buttwipe.(Afterword: Apologies to Professor Lakoff. Yes, I know I'm supposed to be remembering that right-wingers aren't stupid, and aren't necessarily even lying; they just have different values from regular people. I'm really trying, George. It's just that I look at a lunk like Marc T and I don't see values, I see a yutz who, apparent from his dominant mode of self-promoting careerism is brain-dead beyond believe, and viciously determined to avenge his deep awareness of his personal worthlessness on, well, any poor fucker he can get in the crosshairs of his word processor.)#