Coyote Blog

Does Ben Rhodes victory lap bragging about how he pulled the wool over the eyes of a stupid and gullible America on Iran remind anyone else of Jonathon Gruber?  Remember these famous words from Gruber?

"You can't do it political, you just literally cannot do it. Transparent financing and also transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay? So it’s written to do that," Gruber said. "In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in, you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical to get for the thing to pass. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."

Even the justification is the same -- its OK to break the law and lie about it in order to break up gridlock.  (By the way, my mother-in-law -- who tends to be a reliable gauge of mainstream Democratic thinking -- argued the same thing with me, that extra-Constitutional Presidential actions were justified if Congress did not accomplish enough.   Asked about whether she was comfortable with the same power in a Trump administration, she was less sanguine about the idea).

While political lying is old as time, it strikes me that this bragging about it is a new phenomena.  It reminds me of the end of the movie "Wag the Dog", when the Dustin Hoffman character refused to accept that no one would ever know how he manipulated the public into believing there had been a war, and wanted to publicly take the credit.  In the movie, the Administration had Hoffman's character knocked off, because it was counter-productive to reveal the secret, but I wonder if in reality Obama is secretly pleased.

I will fight when my liberty is truly threatened.  But I have absolutely no trust in politicians to determine when this is the case.

Which is why my reaction to this is, Oh Crap!

I am sure it is a total coincidence that, after 35 years of butting heads with Iran, this is occurring during a sputtering economy and within months of a Presidential election.

PS-  I watched Wag the Dog the other night.  Every time Dustin Hoffman said "he f*cked a Firefly girl" all I could think of was Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Jewel Staite, and Summer Glau.  Well worth losing the Presidency for.

Maybe it was just having really low expectations, but I thought Rock was OK last night, though conservative bloggers seemed to have hated the broadcast.  Sure some of the stuff they did flopped (the skit with Adam Sandler comes to mind) but he was moderately funny and while he made fun of a number of people, he was pretty equal-opportunity about it.  And anyone who gets Sean Penn all huffy can't be all bad.  Sure the show may have less gravitas than when Carson hosted it, but compare it to where shows like the Grammy's have gone and it looks like Masterpiece Theater.  And if people want to talk about whether Rock was "serious" enough for the event, they should focus some attention on Al Pacino showing up looking like a homeless person or on Dustin Hoffman trying to present the Best Picture award drunk off his ass.

Other Notes:

• Was the show producer sleeping with Beyoncé, or was she the only singer available?  Why did we see her three times?  And did all of the songs seem to be totally unmemorable or what?
• The women's dresses were generally awsome, while their hair generally looked awful (or at least just dull, which is the same for a Hollywood-type).  I loved the return of those sort-of mermaid-shaped dresses.
• Jamie Foxx was the highlight
• Seeing Clint Eastwood with his young wife was an inspiration for all of us over-40 males.  Seeing his mom there was even more of an inspiration.