Christmas isn’t complete without the weird, humiliating and immediately dated looking family portrait. We collected some of the worst, and we hope they bring you Christmas cheer.
It’s never going to be as discreet as you want it to be. But hopefully your friends aren’t listening through the door.
An imminent threat of chemical weapons, nuclear weapons and the Middle East, but a different administration. Hopefully we think more critically this time.
The Article: Today’s GOP: The Worst Political Party in 150 Years of US History in AlterNet.
The Text: When Steve Benen said that last year’s debt ceiling fiasco was the worst thing an American political party has done since the Civil War, it got me thinking. The Palmer Raids were more an executive branch thing than a congressional one. Republican isolationism in the face of the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and a militant Japan was foolish but also very understandable. The Republican establishment, including the Eisenhower administration, wasn’t too keen on McCarthyism. Even the brutal Jim Crow regime of the Southern Democrats was just that, southern. And if the Democrats deserve a ton of blame for committing us to propping up South Vietnam’s government, they didn’t actually start that policy and they were being pressured into it by the other side. The truth is that, either through shared blame or lack of party unity, no single party can be blamed for doing anything as stupid as the debt ceiling fiasco since the Civil War. The closest I can come is the lockstep support the GOP gave to President Bush and Dick Cheney as they walked us repeatedly into the threshing blades.
The common thread is that only America should be the delusional nation able to have a love affair with weapons; almost always at everyone else’s–and even our own–expense.
Todd Akin. Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich. This year, political punchlines certainly weren’t in short supply. As the year comes to a close, let’s take a look back on the momentary gaffes now eternalized through ink and newsprint.
