Rafael “Ted” Cruz In his Own Words: It’s Republican World! 2015 In Review-- Chapter Eight

- by Noah

With so much media attention being focused on the grotesque megalomania and downright dementia of current Republican poll leader Herr Donald Trumpf, Rafael “Ted” Cruz of Texas by way of Canada has somewhat flown under the radar. But, that is changing. With “Ted” rapidly ascending the polls in the party’s contest of nutcases running for their presidential nomination, it’s time to take a close look at Cruz.

Harvard educated “Ted” Cruz is not stupid. Do not make that mistake. He has argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. He also has put together a very good ground operation and stands to beat out Trump in Iowa 6 weeks from now. Just so you know, one of the cases he argued before The Supreme Court was a case where he was defending the state of Texas when the state was attempting to renege on a promise to donate money to aid impoverished children.

What better way to begin to get to know “Ted” Cruz than by just reading what the man has to say? If you think Donald Trump is a fascist, wait ‘till you get an understanding of “Ted.” If you love fascism, you’ll love Cruz. He makes Trump look like the child that he is.

The following is a list of Quotes Of Would Be President Cruz. Although my end of the year posts have been, to date, strictly about things that were said or done in 2015, I have included quotes from “Ted” from various recent years because it was 2015 that will go down as the year that America started to be aware of the darkness that lives in his mind. We should all be more aware of him.

Quotations From The Charred Little Soul of “Ted” Cruz:

1. "There is no place for gays or atheists in my America. None. Our Constitution makes that clear."
-“Ted” at Liberty University 3/23/15

The only Constitution that makes that clear is the one that exists In Republican World.

2. “If standing for liberty and standing for the Constitution make you a wacko bird, then you can count me a wacko bird.”
-“Ted” 2015

“Ted” responding to Sen. John McCain calling him a wacko bird.

3. “Companies and small business should absolutely not only have the right to turn away gay customers, they should exercise that right. Universal condemnation may convince these people to stop choosing to be gay.
-“Ted” 3/31/15

The ol’ Republican “We reserve the right to refuse service to you” meme. Too bad Lester Maddox is dead. He could get a cabinet position in a Cruz administration. Choosing to be gay?

4. “When gays stayed hidden we had no mass shootings; we had no public nudity. Society was polite. Now anything and everything goes and I blame them.”
-“Ted” at CPAC, 2014

5. “The American people want economic growth back. That should be our top priority. Nothing is killing jobs or hurting the American system more than Obamacare. We need to defund it.”
-“Ted” 2013

Gee, “Ted”, are you sure it isn’t gays that are killing jobs and hurting the American system?

6. “Anyone know if President Obama intends to perform background checks on the Syrian rebels before providing them weapons?”
-“Ted” 2013

Well, “Ted” there is a way to prevent that. It’s called Gun Control.

7. “We are still a nation of laws. You just have to check with Barack Obama every day to see what they are.”
-“Ted” 2014

8. “Obama’s mother’s citizenship is irrelevant since his father wasn’t American and he wasn’t born in America. He can’t be President”
-“Ted” in 2012.

9. “All you need to know about my parentage is my mother was a citizen. My father and place of birth are irrelevant”.
-“Ted” in 2015, 3 years later.

Is “Ted” somehow ashamed of his father’s Cuban heritage? Is that why he goes By “Ted” instead of his given first name?

10. “If the slaves were never freed in the Civil War, you have to wonder, where would Obama be today? Certainly not the White House, not in the capacity he’s in. And you have some in America that think that might not be a bad thing.”
-“Ted” on Hannity 6/16/14

Well, if you’re gonna put that thought out there, you might as well do it on a white supremacist’s show.

11. “There would be less disease, less cancer and aids and diabetes in this country if people would simply pray. God blesses the righteous with good health and curses the immoral with sickness.
-“Ted” at CPAC, 2015

Go ahead. Admit it. You thought he was going to blame “the gays” again. I admit I thought he was. That second sentence sure sounds very Muslim extremist of him, doesn’t it?

12. “The last 24 hours at the United States Supreme Court were among the darkest hours of our nation.”
-“Ted” June, 2015

“Ted” on the day after Marriage Equality was okayed by the court. Yep. Marriage Equality right there on the bad list with the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, the day the Civil War began, the days JFK, Lincoln, MLK, RFK, were killed, the days Bush stole the White House, the day the Challenger exploded, the day Katrina hit, 9/11... Ol’ “Ted” has a real sense of perspective.

13. “I would not, could not with a goat.”
-“Ted”. 2013

I’m not so sure. He represents Texas you know.

14. “I’m grateful to receive the endorsement of Troy Newman. He has served as a voice for the unborn for over 25 years, and works tirelessly every day for the pro-life cause. We need leaders like Troy Newman in this country who will stand up for those who do not have a voice.”
-"Ted," Nov., 2015

Troy Newman is also known for calling for the execution of doctors who perform abortions.

15. “So to express my opposition to Obamacare, I’m going to read Green Eggs And Ham by Dr. Suess. It’s a book about a stubborn jerk who decides he hates something before he tries it and resists trying it with everything he has in him until he finally does give it a taste and then falls in love with it.”
-“Ted” in 2013.

“Ted” as he set out to filibuster the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Like I always say, Republicans have no sense of irony.




UPDATE: Cruz's Outrageous Statements

As one who desires accuracy in media, I need to point out that, of the above quotes, numbers 1, 3, 4, 8 & 9 (the pair of “citizenship” quotes), and 11 are not real. At least some of them, believable as they are, appear to have their origins not from the mouth of Sen. Cruz but from a satire posted on a Facebook site several months ago.

The context of the outrageous things being said in this election cycle, quotes from others on the far right, and other things Sen. Cruz has himself really said make the dubious quotes all the more plausible. I could have used the following now famous hyperbolic, all to real, Cruz quotes:

"We will utterly destroy ISIS. We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we are going to find out.

Or, this one, where Cruz comes up with a nonsensical whopper about Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morrell:

"Mike Morrell testified and told Congress that the reason Obama has not bombed ISIS’ oil fields is that they’re concerned about global warming."

Or, this one:

"Here’s the simple and undeniable fact: The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats."

Or, this one where Cruz references the reaction to recently passed "religious liberty" laws in Indiana and Arkansas that are designed to promote discrimination against LGBT people.

"…the jihad that is being waged right now in Indiana and Arkansas, going after people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman."

The concept of marriage equality really set the righties off this year. Cruz surrogate Sandy Rios, of the American Family Association, predicted divine punishment in the form of worldwide disaster.

In a Republican world where leading Republicans can even blame 9/11 on gays, feminists and People For The American Way, as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson did, it doesn’t take much to believe the number 4 quote in the post. The same can be said for numbers 1, 3, and 11.

Then there’s the context of Cruz being a featured guest, along with Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal, at Pastor Kevin Swanson’s Religious Liberties forum. Among other things, Swanson is known for calling for homosexuals to be rounded up and executed.

The final quote I’d like to mention here because of the context is number 14. This one is real. Ted Cruz said it as he eagerly accepted the endorsement of Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue. The actual quote and more can be found at this link. Newman has endorsed the murder of doctors who perform abortions by praising their actions of those who have. Newman, by his own words, has admitted that he was involved in the creation of the infamous "Baby Parts" hoax video.

He says he served as an "advisor" and "consultant" in the making of the clips which went viral, resulting in congressional hearings and the defunding of Planned Parenthood clinics. The clips have even been treated as real by candidate Carly Fiorina in a nationally televised Republican debate.

The "Baby Parts" hoax persists. I regret and apologize about not being more vigilant and passing some hoax Ted Cruz quotes on. We seem to be living in an era where the difference between reality and satire are becoming blurred to a point where the two are indistinguishable. I don’t want to be a part of that blurring. We must all make the case against Sen. Cruz with the truth. The truth is bad enough.

-Noah

    

What "Crazy Things" Is Ted Cruz (R-TX) Advocating Besides Racism?

Why not 100 Abe Lincolns? 100 Teddy Roosevelts? 100 Dwight Eisenhowers? Not a chance! Those great Republicans were do not come from the same nihilistic, anti-government and anti-democracy wing that is dominated by Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert and Jim DeMint, the GOP politicians that are driving today's party further and further from the mainstream of American political thought. Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower are celebrated by all normal Americans as genuinely crucial historical figures. None of them would recognize Ted Cruz's GOP and all of them would probably feel sickened by Cruz's virulent-- if implied-- racism in his celebration of a divisive, even monstrous, figure like Jesse Helms. I sense Cruz-- like his father-- is a vicious racist and a dangerous elitist. But I have no way of really knowing that. But we do know a lot about Helms, covered beautifully by Chris Hayes in the video up top. And, as Jamelle Bouie, pointed out at yesterday's Daily Beast, Helms' bigotry was anything BUT an obstacle "to his ascendance in the Republican Party."

Helms was a pioneer of the conservative movement; as a vanguard of the evangelical right, as a promoter of direct mail strategies, and as a scorched-earth strategist who won by mobilizing his base and demoralizing his opposition. The Helms approach was crude-- it relied, almost exclusively, on race- and gay-baiting-- but it worked. You can draw a fairly straight line from Helms to Karl Rove, who tamed and adapted the approach for a national audience.

The same goes for the Helms and the Tea Party, which shares his deep hostility to government-- with fanatical opposition to spending on nearly everything but benefits for themselves-- and international cooperation.

One thing, however, is worth noting about Helms, his strategies, and his priorities; at no point was he able to win more than 54 percent of the vote, with a median performance-- out of five elections over twenty-four years-- of 52.6 percent. And of course, his support was almost exclusively white.

In other words, you can win with a base mobilization strategy, but it leaves you vulnerable to demography. As soon as your voters drop as a share of the electorate, the game is over. Which is what happened to Helms's successor, Elizabeth Dole, who lost her 2008 reelection bid to the young, multi-racial coalition of Kay Hagan. Which brings us back to Ted Cruz.

His pitch to Republicans is straightforward. It's not that America rejects your ideas or your principles, it's that we haven't done enough to apply them. The people want a conservative fighter, and if we slash government even more, we'll be rewarded with victory. Hence his strident disdain for the House Republican leaders who want to avoid a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act. Cruz has sparked a near-rebellion among ultraconservative House members with his open attacks on a plan to "defund" Obamacare with a symbolic vote, and pass a separate continuing resolution to fund the government.

But Cruz is wrong. The broad public has consistently voiced its opposition to the GOP's anti-government mania. In last year's elections, it didn't just reject Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan; it turned its back Republican candidates at all levels of government. The Jesse Helms approach to politics-- which Cruz exemplifies-- has been nothing but destructive to GOP prospects. It dominates the House of Representatives, where far-right conservatives dominate the GOP caucus, and cost Republicans a Senate majority in two consecutive elections. Indeed, the pattern of of legislative hostage-taking, debt ceiling threats, and endless confrontations is poised to do the same in next year's elections.

Simply put, the only thing the Republican Party has to gain from Ted Cruz and his brigade of Jesse Helms's is the complete collapse of its national appeal. Which is why, if I were working to preserve the future of the GOP, I would be looking for every way possible to sabotage Cruz before he-- and his acolytes-- do irreparable harm to the party.

The "Thurmond rule" and the GOP's "heads I win, tails you lose" approach to government

Say, has anyone checked lately to see if Ol' Strom, that worthless, doody-sucking old pile of puke, is still dead?

The “[Thurmond] rule,” named for the late senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, posits that, sometime in the summer in a presidential election year, no judges will be confirmed without the consent of the Republican and Democratic leaders and the Judiciary Committee chairman and ranking minority member.

Democrats have refused to recognize the rule and are known to flout it, blissfully confirming Republican presidents’ nominees well into the fall — thus cutting the number of vacancies that an incoming Democratic president might be able to fill.

The Republicans not only adhere to the rule but have been most adept at a fine four-corner stall until the rule might plausibly be invoked.

by Ken

Well, sure, his North Carolina neighbor Jesse Helms was worse, but that doesn't mean Strom didn't devote every ounce of his being to being the vilest, scummiest human being he had it in him to be, right up to the end. Remember those months (years?) when only the people closest to him, who kept him tightly protected off from public scrutiny, knew for sure whether the giant blob of protoplasm was genuinely alive or not?

Now Al Kamen reminds us, in this item from his Washington Post "In the Loop" column, that whatever the present state of his vital signs, the shame of South Carolina continues to befoul the Republic. To make it even more delicious, it's with the complicity of Senate Democrats, but then, what would you have them do? There is a principle involved, after all.

Still, while Senate Dems stand by their modest principle, Senate Republicans get to screw them both ways, no matter which party holds the White House. Brother Al --

Here come the judges

The Senate on Monday confirmed the last three of 17 judges under a deal cut by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Republican leader Mitch McConnell in March. The three nominees — one to an appellate court, the others to U.S. District Court seats — had been confirmed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The three are Jacqueline H. Nguyen for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California, John Z. Lee for a District Court seat in Illinois and Kristine G. Baker for a District Court seat in Arkansas. Nguyen would be the first Vietnamese American federal appeals court judge.

The action leaves 19 judicial nominees awaiting votes on the Senate floor, five of them for appeals courts and 14 for trial or district court slots.

While some observers — including, sadly, this column — too often dismiss the district judges as chopped liver, it should be noted that they are the ones who do the heavy lifting in keeping the federal courthouses running and case backlogs as low as possible.

As it turns out, many of those confirmed under the deal are filling seats in courthouses where there are judicial “emergencies,” meaning there aren’t enough judges to keep up with the work.

So the 19 pending nominees, all of them approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year, will sweat it out until the August recess, when the “Thurmond rule” often shuts down the process.

The “rule,” named for the late senator from South Carolina . . . .

Which of course is where we came in, dear reader.

One more thing about those district judges "often dismissed as chopped liver." It is, of course, true that "they are the ones who do the heavy lifting in keeping the federal courthouses running and case backlogs as low as possible." They are also the "bench" for those circuit-court appeals judges, who in turn have their shot at positioning themselves for Supreme Court vacancies. The more the Republicans are able to pack the district courts with their scum and the Democrats are unable to get confirmation even for their inoffensive (except to out-of-touch-with-reality zealots) moderates, the more the weight of the judiciary is stacked against judicial reason.

At this point, while it remains theoretically possible, though practically speaking improbable, that the Obama administration may be able to get itself fully staffed by the time its first -- and possibly only -- term draws to a close, it's not possible that the president will succeed in replenishing the dangerously depleted federal judiciary. Imagine how the America-hating vermin who make up the Senate Republican Infestation must be congratulating themselves for successfully Democratic judicial appointments, keeping them to a bare minimum, until the sacred "Thurmond rule" kicks in and lifts the weight of the obstructionist burden from their shoulders.

I'm also thinking, as we take this stroll down memory lane revisiting the ghosts of Strom and Jesse, of the relief many of us felt when the pair of them finally had the decency to depart the Senate. (Strom was finally pronounced officially dead six months later, but Jesse, clinging to his reputation as the country's biggest son of a bitch, hung on for another five years.) Not to mention the same-cycle skedaddling of putrid Phil Gramm. Surely, we thought, the caliber of Republican senators couldn't help but be upgraded with those departures. The joke is on us.

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The judge's plea for ideological restraint in filling 4th Circuit Court vacancies would ring truer if his court wasn't a hotbed of right-wing activism

In the Powell Courthouse in Richmond, home of the U.S. Fourth Circuit, it often seems as if Jefferson Davis is still president. (Though never tried, he was arraigned in this building, which served as the Confederate treasury.)

by Ken

There seems to be general agreement that J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a congenial, gracious judge, in the mold of his mentor, for whom he clerked in 1972-73, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr., for whom the building in which he works is named: the Lewis F. Powell Jr. Courthouse, the Richmond seat of the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. (It is often pointed out in notes on Judge Wilkinson that Powell was a good friend of his father, Richmond businessman J. Harvie Wilkinson Jr.)

Judge Wilkinson was appointed to the Fourth Circuit in 1984 by Ronald Reagan. He served the allowed seven-year term as chief judge (1996-2003), and now is the senior-most active judge on the court.

Now, for all Judge Wilkinson's graciousness and congeniality, it is generally agreed that he played a leading role in establishing the Fourth Circuit -- long the proprietary enclave of the late Sen. Jesse Helms, who was said to at least sign off on, if not actually propose, every court appointment -- as the most conservative of the 13 circuit courts, a hotbed of right-wing judicial activism.

There was a time when the judge was thought to be a leading candidate for elevation to the Supreme Court. It's generally thought that the fact that he talked publicly about his interview with President George W. Bush ended his chance. In fact, not one but two Fourth Circuit judges were thought to be on the Bush short list: Wilkinson and his more stridently conservative colleague-rival, J. Michael Luttig. Apparently neither of them was judged to be a John Roberts, a Harriet Myers, or a Sammy Alito, and Judge Luttig didn't hang around waiting for another shot. In 2006, at the age of 51, he gave up his lifetime federal court appointment to take a job with Boeing.

Judge Luttig was replaced on the court, but the Bush regime has had a tough time getting appointments to the Fourth Circuit confirmed by the Senate. Maybe it's just a coincidence that Jesse Helms is no longer around to watch over "his" court. Probably it has more to do with Senate Democrats' growing unwillingness to rubber-stamp more of the judicial sludge Chimpy the Prez pumped into the federal judiciary. In any case, there are now a total of four vacancies on the Fourth Circuit awaiting appointments by President Obama.

Yesterday Judge Wilkinson weighed in with a Washington Post op-ed plea to the president not to "polarize" the Fourth Circuit. For anyone familiar with the court's recent history, it was a pretty astonishing exercise. Well, read for yourself:

Storming the 4th Circuit

By J. Harvie Wilkinson III
Friday, January 23, 2009; A15

So the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit is set for a takeover. Popular commentary has it that the court, on which I serve, is a fortress or bastion or citadel of conservatism. Discussion of coming changes suggests more the fruits of a successful military campaign than the result of an election giving our new president the right to nominate members to a judicial body.

This is all understandable -- to a point. Victory is exhilarating. There are no Supreme Court vacancies. With four vacancies on our 15-member court, the 4th Circuit may be the best game in town. With the new numbers in the Senate, the temptation is there to go for an ideological makeover.

Yet the tempting course would prove a misguided one. Of course there will be change, as there should be after every presidential election. While no two judges will ever agree on everything (regardless of who appointed them), the differences between appointees of Republican and Democratic administrations can be important. "I don't understand how someone so nice and so smart can be so wrong," I have told my wife. Her reply? "And did you stop to think, Jay, that they could be saying the same -- or worse -- about you?"

But these differences, however significant, are not the whole story. And ideology should not be the foremost criterion for selecting a judge. Many people may not believe it, but judges are not politicians in robes. Many of us found out long ago that we weren't all that good at politics. (I left law school to run for Congress, and the voters sent me back with a spanking.) So we became law nerds. We focused on standards of review, burdens of proof, and somnolent textual and structural discussions. And, when we were at our best, these arcana were not things unto themselves but became connected to the larger purposes of liberty and order that it is our duty to uphold and serve.

Law, then, is a medium through which judges of disparate beliefs often can find common ground. Ideological fervor is law's great antithesis. This is especially true on the courts of appeal, which, unlike the Supreme Court, do not have self-selected dockets and whose cases are often more technically challenging than ideologically flavored. Congress put federal circuit judges on panels of three for a reason -- namely, so that we could listen as well as talk, give as well as take and make the accommodations (more narrow rulings, less strident opinions) without which appellate courts cannot function. The 4th Circuit has never prided itself on ideology but on the collegiality that takes minds out of concrete and prevents personal animosities from clouding and distorting the essential act of judgment.

Courts of appeal, while inferior in constitutional rank to the Supreme Court, do matter. And it's not just because the Supreme Court cannot answer every question. Our two great oceans once marked a neat divide between domestic and foreign policy. It was easier for earlier courts to say which was which and to stay out of the latter. But the oceans are no longer the barriers they were, and the courts at all levels have become inescapably involved in matters pertaining to armed struggle and conflict. Today, the misadventures of the third branch can, like the miscalculations of elected bodies, place tens or hundreds of thousands at risk or, conversely, hasten the loss of our priceless heritage of personal liberty.

Wisdom in judging resides, now more than ever, in knowing all that we do not know, in resisting the urge to become ideologically self-assured. Perhaps, too, it resides in recognizing that persons throughout public and private life often, though by no means always, go about the tasks that society has assigned them with the same good faith that we go about our own. Perhaps it resides in understanding that judges, as quintessential generalists, occupy a vital role in this age of specialization, though it is one in which whole realms of knowledge will elude the powers of even the most incandescent judicial intellect. Wherever wisdom resides, it does not lie with the ideologues; activism of all persuasions is a trade best practiced away from the bench.

If all this marks me conservative, I wear that designation proudly. But far more than a conservative, I am an American. Our country faces deep and endemic difficulties, and the need for a successful presidency has seldom been so great. While the views I express here are solely my own, I feel certain that every judge on our small plot of public earth would bend every effort, within the limits of the laws and Constitution, to contribute to the larger good.

To be sure, there will be change and disagreement on the 4th Circuit, but I pray that coming appointments to our court will not cause the doors of communication and compromise to slam shut. A polarized 4th Circuit would bring no discernible public benefit. At the end of the day, it's not lines of battle; it's not us and them. Americans are in this together, and that includes the courts.

The writer is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

It all sounds swell, of course. But then, there's the Fourth Circuit's record. One can understand the sensititivity of its judicial conservatives to President Obama's Lincolnesque associations; inside the Lewis F. Powell Jr. Courthouse, there seems to be a hazy illusion that Jefferson Davis is still the president. (The building now known as the Powell Courthouse served as the Confederate government's treasury, and C.S.A. President Davis -- although never tried -- was arraigned there.)

This is a court so commitedly conservative that one suspects the less conservative Clinton appointees have learned to shut up because they have so little chance of having any influence. As I understand it, the general procedure has been that, on rare occasions when a three-judge panel of the Fourth rules "wrong," the decision is bucked up to the full court to make it "right."

Of course, it could be that Judge Wilkinson is saying something different when he warns about polarization of the Fourth Circuit: that if the president appoints some really uppity judges to overturn the present conservative majority, he and his heretofore collegial colleagues are prepared to become the shrieking ideologues of our worst nightmares.

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"In the Loop" (on Thursday!): No plum ambassador gigs for fat-cat contributors? Plus, prospects for the ultra-right Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals

The Powell Courthouse in Richmond, home to the ultra-conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has four vacancies waiting for the new president to fill

"The big-money types and "bundlers," the fundraisers who helped put together Obama's stunning financial advantage, are expecting their reward -- say a nice, cushy ambassadorship in Rome or Paris or London. . . . But the chatter is that they'd better not count on it. The traditional sale of most ambassadorships, so aptly carried on during the Bush administration, may not continue."

-- Al Kamen, in his "In the Loop" column in today's Washington Post

by Ken

From the brain trust at the Washington Post came word yesterday that the old Federal Page, containing news of the inner workings of the intricate webs of government in the District of Columbia, has been replaced by something online called The Fed Page, which as best I can tell is going to contain news of the inner workings of the intricate webs of government in the District of Columbia.

Check. Maybe if I had the print edition as well as the online one I would understand better. But then, my understanding doesn't seem high on anyone's list of priorities.

However, one feature of The Fed Page caught my notice:

*In the Loop: Longtime Washington Post columnist Al Kamen reports throughout the week on the comings and goings and pratfalls of the federal government.

What's interesting here is, first, that apparently "In the Loop" will now refer only to our pal Al's inimitably wicked reports -- fed by what appears to be a veritable army of Inside the Beltway informants -- on the seedy underbelly of the permanent government. Although most of us think automatically of him when we hear "In the Loop," the Post has been using it as a standing head that also covered supposedly similar (bah!) columns by other writers.

Even more interesting is this business of Al reporting "throughout the week." Of late his publication schedule had shrunk to Wednesday and Friday. But sure enough, here we have a full helping of "In the Loop" on Thursday.

It leads off with the above-referenced item on early word regarding Obama administration ambassadorships:

Under Obama, the Envoy Convoy May Screech to a Halt

By Al Kamen
Thursday, November 6, 2008; A28

You'd think everyone on the Obama team would be celebrating today. But you'd be wrong.

There is major agita among some key elements of President-elect Barack Obama's juggernaut. For example, the big-money types and "bundlers," the fundraisers who helped put together Obama's stunning financial advantage, are expecting their reward -- say a nice, cushy ambassadorship in Rome or Paris or London. (By tradition, about one-third of the nation's 190 ambassadors are political appointees. They're the ones who get the fine European postings.)

But the chatter is that they'd better not count on it. The traditional sale of most ambassadorships, so aptly carried on during the Bush administration, may not continue.

Early speculation is that Obama may be more inclined to follow the Clinton model and select people, often political types, with some foreign policy credentials or knowledge of a country's language or culture. Clinton generally picked the high-rollers for smaller -- albeit quite lovely -- places such as Prague or Vienna. So you may have to forget about the Via Veneto.

Al also has reports on the early days of the Obama transition team, and an especially provocative item, "New Order in the Courts," which focuses not just on the obvious question of preparing for Supreme Court vacancies ("possibilities include Diane P. Wood, a federal appeals court judge in the 7th Circuit and on the faculty at University of Chicago, where Obama once taught; Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School; appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor; and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick") but on the 15 appeals court and 36 district court openings the new president already has to fill -- with an eased path to confirmation thanks to the larger majority the Democrats will now have on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The "most likely target right off the bat" is four openings (out of 15 seats) on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland). The Fourth Circuit, Al reminds us, is "long a bastion for conservative legal theories," but he doesn't remind us that it used to be more or less the personal preserve of the late Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Filling those four vacancies could bring about, wonder of wonders, a Democratic majority on the Fourth Circuit.

What's more,

Obama could expand his reach further if Congress passes a bill that adds new positions on the circuit court bench, which has not expanded since 1991, despite a 50 percent increase in the number of appellate filings in that time.

Already, liberal advocates, who have been in the political wilderness for eight years, are scurrying to prepare lists of potential nominees for appellate judgeships. "There's a pretty aggressive effort to try to identify candidates," said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice.

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DWT exclusive! Now it can be told: David S. Broder has been mounted and stuffed for decades. You won't believe who's writing "his" columns!

McCranky -- a reformer in the mold of T.R., says David S.

"So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let's face it, zero experience in foreign affairs? Being the nominal commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard doesn't count, unless you think Vladimir Putin is about to order an invasion across the Bering Strait.

"At a time when the nation also confronts enormous challenges at home, Palin has, um, slightly more than zero experience in domestic affairs. The reason most people move to Alaska is that it's different from the rest of the country. Salmon fishing and snowmobile racing are not front-page news in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today, The Cynicism Express

"Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than [Harriet] Miers was for the [Supreme C]ourt. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers's fate. . . .

"That only a handful of conservatives have so far expressed doubts about Palin demonstrates that ideology is what drove them during the Miers fight, and drives them still. Miers's lack of experience was, for many conservatives, a convenient rationale for opposing someone they worried might become another David Souter. Palin's lack of experience is irrelevant because she is right -- actually, quite far right -- on the conservatives' issues."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washinton Post column yesterday, Northern Underexposure

"How Palin Could Help"

-- title of the column attributed to "David S. Broder" in yesterday's Washington Post

by Ken
EXCLUSIVE TO DOWN WITH TYRANNY

To the extent that the media do their job, there is one basic take on the choice of Governor Who??? to be Young Johnny McCranky's running mate, and that is that the Crankyman has chosen to take a flying leap into history as a laughingstock, as the least-fit-to-serve candidate ever to make it onto the presidential ballots of all the states in the history of the republic, including minor as well as major party nutsos.

Really, now, while there are hundreds if not thousands of questions to be asked, and the number balloons every day, and many of those questions are pretty darned important, it all boils down to one question, really:

How would anyone in his or her right mind DARE to vote for a McCranky-Who??? ticket?

This is after all, a presidential candidate who appears on a host of medical grounds to be at death's door, or on some of his feebler days to have slipped inside the door for a quick liedown. And the person he has chosen to step in for him is someone who, apart from being a babe of sorts, has no qualifications of any kind for the presidency except loudly proclaimed commitment to a few ultra-right-wing (in particular Christian Right) talking points. She doesn't even qualify as an "ultra-right-winger," since on most of the issues confronting the president of the U.S. -- including the whole realm of foreign policy, but hardly limited to that -- she has, as far as we can tell, no views at all.

But the Crankyman was desperate, and knew he needed to roll the dice. So he apparently gambled that, since he couldn't have his buddy Holy Joe Lieberman at his side, he'd go the other way: to a complete stranger, known only for (a) being a former beauty near-queen (hey, people like good-looking people) and (b) espousing a few Hard Right crazinesses that might solidify his support among the crazies and stoopids who make up the Republican Base, whose trust he is incredibly still trying to win at this late date.

And so as we scan yesterday and today's op-ed pages in the hometown newspaper of Our Nation's Village, that tiny enclave that sometimes seems to exist in the mind and nowhere else (unless it's Our Nation's Lobbyists' money-shoveling operations), we find sensible people like Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne Jr. writing sensibly, and even the likes of Richard Cohen sort of getting it. And then there's "David S. Broder" [left], taking the side of, well the crazies and the stoopids, the people our Johnny is forging into a coalition he dares to dream will propel him into the White House.

Which is why it seems to me long past time to rip the cover off the charade. People, there is no David S. Broder.

Oh, there once was a David S. He was a harmless drone who churned out dull but inoffensive platitudes about American politics.

David S.'s most famous innovation, of course, was his cherished Field Trips into the Real America -- for the purpose of communing with his belly button. He was rarely given proper credit for his courage in undertaking these field trips, which carried with them the risk of running into Real People, who might actually say Real Stuff.

Of course our David S. was tough enough for that. He had been to zoos, after all, and so had experience observing native fauna in their not-quite-natural habitat. Sometimes he would, in flagrant violation of the posted warnings not to feed the animals, toss them the odd peanut.

What's more, it's not as if David S. was at risk of hearing something from those natives that might disturb the stone-engraved "wisdom" drawn from all that belly-button watching. After all, the last time he was known to have listened to anyone who wasn't a certified elder of his Village-by-the-Potomac was sometime in the early 1970s when his mother reproached him for not calling more often and he shot back, "Jeez Louise, Ma, I'm due at Sally Quinn's. Her cook is trying a new recipe for Quiche Villageoise."

What's more, encountering these rough Real Persons in the wild (as it were), in their luncheonettes and bars, relieved him of the lurking fear that one of those ruffians might someday show up at his very own Village doorstep with a view toward actually setting foot inside! (Oh, the horror!)

So yes, there once was a David S., but surely it has been obvious that he no longer exists, and surely hasn't for decades. Although it appears impossible to ascertain when exactly David S. moved on to the Great Punditorium in the Beyond, there really isn't room for doubt that he has passed.

"Are you going to tell me," said Milton S. Tumblewit, professor emeritus of punditology at the Outside the Village University School of Journalism, "that these last several decades' worth of mindlessly repetitive and predictable pseudo-'centrist' drivel were written by an actual living, breathing human being?"

Many of those who were once close to David S. acknowledge that the Master, as he liked to be called, is no longer with them. One longtime intimate, who was granted anonymity on account of he's a really famous Village columnist who lacks the common sense or decency or simple shame to be mortified by this remembrance, nevertheless recalls:

I remember once I went into a phase where I became really preoccupied with finding the True Political Center -- not some close approximation, but the real, exact center. I knew as long as I was even millimeters away from True Center, I couldn't give my readers the real American punditry they deserve. So my desk filled up with protractors and compasses and T-squares and slide rules and stuff.

Until one day David S. (he liked to be called"David S." -- either that or 'Master') said to me in that special authoritative way he had, where you knew he was telling you God's Own Truth, he said, 'You don't need all that fancy paraphernalia, boychik. If you want to find the Real Center, just keep moving right until you feel your head spinning like a hula hoop on crack.'

I love to tell that story at Village soirees. I swear every time I tell it it brings a tear to Ben Bradlee's eye."

There is, it should be noted, a dissenting school, which acknowledges that the writing of David S.'s columns passed into other hands at some point, probably in the '70s, but insists that he didn't die.

THE REVISIONIST THEORY: DAVID S., CHANTEUSE

Instead he is said to have let his hair and nails grow, and after several seasons of summer stock rolled out his one-man show, Mary Martin, Mary Martin, in which he attempted to recapture the spirit of America's favorite singing gamine. Adherents of this theory point out that David S. had already achieved great acclaim playing two of the beloved Mary's most famous roles with the Village Light Opera Company (admission by invitation only): the title role of Peter Pan and the irrepressible young governess Maria in The Sound of Music, where he was especially admired for his yodeling in the song "The Lonely Goatherd."

Upon his passing, the real David S. was mounted and stuffed, and an amazing number of people appear to have been fooled. The result bears an uncanny likeness to Phineas T. Bluster of the old Howdy Doody show. How then, you ask, has the Washington Post continued to publish a never-ending stream of mindless blather under the David S. byline?

A now-retired but formerly highly placed source at the paper agreed to spill the beans to Down With Tyranny, on condition of anonymity ("I wouldn't dare show my face at Sally's house," he -- or she -- said).

A lot of people think we just had that crap written by an intern, maybe one who had once had to retype several of his columns when the spam filter on our e-mail system deleted them. Or more likely a succession of interns, on the theory that no one person could keep churning out that dim-witted crap.

The truth is actually more exotic.

You've probably heard of the theory that a whole bunch of monkeys -- you know, a really, really lot of them -- put at typewriters would eventually type the works of Shakespeare. This is usually thought of as a mere theoretical comment on randomness. It's not well known that a project to test the theory was actually funded in the late '60s and early '70s by the National Endowment for the Humanities, using 500 monkeys working on early IBM PCs (and not as is sometimes maliciously reported, PC Jr.'s).

In fact, the project achieved some surprising successes. Most notably, two of the simians in collaboration produced a version of Julius Caesar that was surprisingly similar to the one we know, at least up to the point where the stabbed Caesar turns to his erstwhile friend Brutus and says, "Et tu, Bongo?" At this point the whole thing deteriorated quickly into farce, in the form of scampering, howling antics that closely resembled a routine once done by a pair of trained chimpanzees named Biffy and Miffy on The Ed Sullivan Show. Or at least that was the claim advanced by Biffy and Miffy's trainer, Col. Beeson M. Mifflin, in legal papers that were filed as a prelude to a possible lawsuit.

Some people claim that the threatened lawsuit spelled doom for the Simian Shakespeare project. In fact, it was shut down when the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) [right], alarmed by reports of the project's successes, succeeded in cutting off funding, insisting: "It's bad enough that filth was written once. We're certainly not going to having it written again on the taxpayers' dime, and especially not by a bunch of monkeys who are no smarter than me!"

With the monkeys thrown out of work, and re-employment prospects bleak (the Sullivan show was off the air by then), we at the Post knew we could probably get them to work cheap. What we weren't prepared for was how quickly and how successfully some of the monkeys -- the more pedantic ones, it has to b said, who were usually derided by their more creative peers -- developed a remarkable imitation of David S.'s "voice." When the first "Broder" book written entirely by the monkeys was published and several Washington reviewers declared, "Rejoice, Real Americans! The Master has never been in more iconic form," we ordered extra bananas for all of the team.

And so here we are, in September 2008, and yesterday we had E. J. Dionne writing:

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

And today Eugene Robinson noting:

Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin's central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the "Bridge to Nowhere" -- a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And as a candidate for governor just two years ago, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.

But then there was David S., or rather the David S. Monkey Collective, writing "How Palin Could Help."

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer -- ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain's major theme.

Now, this is -- and I wish there were a more polite way of saying it -- so fucking stupid, in every particular, that if it had been written by an actual pundit, you'd have to say it would be a simple act of human kindness to take him out to the meadow and put him out of his misery.

Of course we know who really wrote it. And I for one refuse to attempt to engage a bunch of monkeys in political dialogue. It's likely to be more stimulating and productive than dialoguing with, say, the Crazies and Stoopids for McCranky. Still, there are limits.

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HAPPY 4th OF JULY

Former senator and far right obstructionist Jesse Helms died early this morning. He had been senile for many years and was unable to make any sense for... well, that depends on who you ask. The L.A. Times headline certainly didn't mince any words about how Helms would be remembered: Former U.S. senator Jesse Helms dies; unyielding Southerner relied on race-baiting campaign tactics. Many thought he was already dead but if history mentions him at all it will be for his startlingly reactionary politics and for the "courtly manner and mossy drawl [that] barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art."

That line from today's NY Times is beautifully captured in a short film about Helms, who was played by Andrew Daly:



Larry Harmon, who played Bozo the Clown passed away a few hours before Helms. Best coverage of the passing of the more tragic clown can be found at Pam's House Blend.