Who’s making me mad now? Dan Bartlett and CBS

So, I’m watching the post-speech analysis on CBS News and lo and behold, I hear commentary by Dan Bartlett about how President Obama will need to operate over the next few years with Congress and the public. Now, Dan Bartlett has never worked professionally for a politician not named George W. Bush. So exactly what insight does CBS think he brings to the table? I mean did W. have an actual Congressional strategy other than, “Here’s my plan. Pass it?”

What's making me mad now: Nothing Today

Because Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.

It's a great day to be an American.

Whose making me mad now: Peter Beinart

In today’s Washington Post, Peter Beinart, who can be a thoughtful center-right commentator about foreign policy issue writes an absurd piece in the Washington Post Outlook Section titled, “Admit It: The Surge Worked”

Let’s dismiss this quickly. To argue that the surge worked in the absence of how it fits into Iraq War policy is akin to a gambler who lost thousands at the poker table telling tales about how he won a couple of hundred bucks on his last hand.

Aside for echoing John McCain’s failed political strategy of pretending that the only decision that matter in the Iraq War was the surge, the rest of Beinart’s piece makes the even more absurd argument that, to be intellectually honest, liberals and Democrats need to acknowledge when Bush was right – as, according to him, he was on the surge. Beinart writes,

Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences [the Gulf War of 1991 and welfare reform]. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.

Apparently, Beinart missed most of the last decade in Washington. What Beinart describes is Republican Washington since at lease 1994. But he decides to use this to describe progressives, with whom Beinart might have had a couple of run-ins.

So, here’s my advice for Beinart. Next time you decide to blast progressives because they were right, how about condemning conservatives for acting like they were right when evidence suggests they weren’t.

"But I'm Mad Now"

In 1997, The Simpsons (the greatest show on television) aired an episode, "The Cartridge Family," that contained the following exchange.

HOMER
Oh, I don’t need anything like that… yet… Just give me my gun.

(He tries to take the gun.)

CLERK
I’m sorry, but the law requires a five-day waiting period. We’ve got to run a background check.

HOMER
Five days? But I’m mad now! I’d kill you if I had my gun.

CLERK
Yeah, well you don’t.

(Homer walks out of the store, muttering.)

Homer's immortal line, "But I'm Mad Now," inspires this blog, because for me, I want to talk about the things that annoyed me today. It'll be mostly about politics, religion, and the media, with an occassional sports rant thrown in.

Welcome to my world!