Now that Steve Bannon is out of the White House he is ready to wage war....on pretty much everybody it seems.

It seems that the minute that Steve Bannon was fired from the White House he ran right back to Breitbart to prepare for the war to come.

Bannon also reached out to the Weekly Standard to give yet another angry, whiskey inspired interview describing what that war will look like: 

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

(Personally I always imagine Bannon's words coming out in a kind of drunken slur.)

Bannon says that his departure was voluntary, and that he’d planned it to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his joining the Trump campaign as chief executive, on August 14, 2016. 

“On August 7th , I talked to [Chief of Staff John] Kelly and to the President, and I told them that my resignation would be effective the following Monday, on the 14th,” he said. “I’d always planned on spending one year. General Kelly has brought in a great new system, but I said it would be best. I want to get back to Breitbart.”

Other reports from inside the White House suggest that Bannon has been on his way out for some time, and that finally Trump had had enough of his constant attempts to take credit for Trump's election win and policy choices.

“Now, it’s gonna be Trump,” Bannon said. “The path forward on things like economic nationalism and immigration, and his ability to kind of move freely . . . I just think his ability to get anything done—particularly the bigger things, like the wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for, it’s just gonna be that much harder.” 

Bannon assigns blame for the thwarting of his program on “the West Wing Democrats,” but holds special disdain for the Washington establishment—especially those Republicans who have, he believes, willfully failed to provide Trump with meaningful victories. 

And, he believes, things are about to get worse for Trump. “There’s about to be a jailbreak of these moderate guys on the Hill”—a stream of Republican dissent, which could become a flood.

Bannon believes that these moderate Republicans have purposefully interfered with Trump's attempts to keep his campaign promises about building that stupid wall and kicking all of the Muslims out.

“What Trump ran on—border wall, where is the funding for the border wall, one of his central tenets, where have they been? Have they rallied around the Perdue-Cotton immigration bill? On what element of Trump’s program, besides tax cuts—which is going to be the standard marginal tax cut—where have they rallied to Trump’s cause? They haven’t.”

“I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” he says. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling, I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”

Bannon is also under the impression that he has already made a lasting impact on American politics during his brief tenure in the White House, but now unshackled can do even more.

“I feel jacked up,” he says. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons. Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian.’ I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”

"Hands back on my weapons," well this seems a little unsettling.

Especially since Trump significantly raised Bannon and Breitbart's profile, giving them the kind of mainstream conservative legitimacy that they struggled for before.

Bannon really could push Trump's agenda forward and shame Republicans for not supporting it, or turn on Trump like a rabid dog and help bring down his presidency.

Which clearly worries Trump enough that he is still smooching on Bannon's lily white, acne encrusted ass.

I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton - it was great! Thanks S

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2017

With Democrats "Liberal" is no longer a dirty word.

Leave it to conservatives to label intelligence a mental disease.

Courtesy of Vox: 

For as long as I've been alive, one of the great asymmetries of American politics has been that mainstream Republican Party politicians proudly call themselves "conservative" whereas Democratic Party standard-bearers are reluctant to wear the "liberal" label. 

But this chart from the Pew Center indicates that the time may be right for a change — with self-identified liberals now outnumbering self-identified moderates among rank-and-file Democrats, we should expect to see more Democratic elected officials coming out as liberals.

 Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but I have NEVER stopped calling myself liberal even after the Right Wing did everything that they could to smear the word and make it as radioactive as possible.

I remember all too well how back in the 80's Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and others on the conservative side would spit the word out like it was a curse or something.

Even back then my whole attitude was well if these assholes hate that word then it must be the right thing to be. And I still feel that way today.

So let me just roll out the welcome mat for all of our new, or newly open, members and say that both you and your radical progressive ideas have found a home.

P.S. Oh yeah, I am also still openly calling myself an Atheist, so you all let me know when you are finally comfortable with THAT title and we will have ourselves a wild, and very liberal, drunken bacchanal.

The duplicity of Lisa Murkowski, and why moderates should wash their hands of her.

This editorial was written by Fairbanks resident and political activist Sean McGuire. And it comes to us courtesy of the Fairbanks Newsminer:  

Let’s go back four years to August 2010. In what many view as the biggest upset in Alaska political history, Sen. Murkowski was defeated in the primary by the far-right candidate, Joe Miller. She was beaten fair and square. 

What did she do? She spent the next two-plus months running around Alaska pleading with Native Alaskans and moderate Democrats to save her political life with a write-in campaign. She promised she would represent those moderate voters’ interests. Sen. Mark Begich didn’t attempt to interfere; he let Alaskans decide who they wanted. In the end, Natives and Democrats did indeed save her. 

During the next six years, Alaska’s two senators apparently worked well together, collaborating on many issues and voting the same way more than any other split-party senators in the nation. 

Fast forward four years to this election. Sen. Begich, the champion of the Natives — overwhelmingly endorsed by AFN, and a true moderate — was fighting for his political life. 

What did Sen. Murkowski do? When Begich was most vulnerable, she stuck a knife in his back, going on TV and saying she didn’t have a good partner in the Senate. And just as dishonorably, she betrayed all those moderate Democrats who had come to her rescue when her political life was hanging by a thread. 

Politics is a nasty business. But in my opinion, the dishonor Sen. Murkowski displayed is several levels deep. It’s not only that she betrayed those who saved her. There’s a longstanding tradition in the U.S. Senate: you don’t turn on your colleague in an election.

There's more but I think that this really captures the meat of Mr. McGuire's point.

And it is quite a valid point.

Murkowski has demonstrated herself to be a cagey political operative, who quickly calculates where she needs to position herself in order to retain her Senate seat and garner support for the future.

When she needed moderates, she was moderate. And when she believes she needs conservatives, well...she IS still daddy's little girl.

Clearly she recognized that the Republicans would most likely capture the Senate in this elections cycle, and positioned herself accordingly. I am sure in her mind Begich's lost Senate seat is simply an acceptable casualty in her strategy to gain more power.

And she has indeed gained that power.

She will now be given the chairmanship of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which will allow her to once again campaign for the opening of ANWR, even as we are faced with information about climate change which should dissuade any reasonable person from even entertaining such an idea. (To be fair Mark Begich also promoted the opening of ANWR. You really cannot get elected up here if you are against it.)

The President will of course veto the proposal and it will never happen, but it is once again a move that puts her in alignment with the Republican platform.

And there she will remain right up until it works against her in retaining her seat, and then my friends we will see the Murkowski's political chameleon act once again.

We deserve better that is for sure, however I reiterate once again that Murkowski will undoubtedly hold onto her seat right up until she no longer wants it, or until some unforeseen scandal knocks her out of the running. 

Because that's just the way things work in Alaska.

More information regarding the new book, "The Sound and the Fury of Sarah Palin."

Well this certainly captures the "fury" part!

Courtesy of Goose Creek Patch:

 "I'm trying to approach Sarah Palin, not as one of her devote followers, and not as a liberal who hates everything about her, but as a moderate who hates everything about her," Lamb said. 

"I'm trying to take the point of view of a conservative looking at Sarah Palin, and that the idea is that she represents, not a danger toward the United States as we tend to know it, but as a danger toward Conservatism." 

Throughout the book Lamb examines Palin's own writings, interviews she has given and things people, mostly conservatives, have written about her. The book also includes 30 editorial cartoons penned by 10 Pulitzer Award-winning cartoonists. 

Lamb says Palin is the latest in a long line of American demagogues, the successor to Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s. 

"I judge her based on her writings, and her interviews, and her speeches," Lamb said. "And I don't think there's any fairer way to judge someone." 

That does sound fair.

That has largely been my method as well.  Just let Palin talk and then point out how idiotic the things she said were. She rarely disappoints.

I think that Lamb has a pretty good handle on Palin overall. "When we accept demagoguery into our homes, we're never the same again," Lamb said. "These people don't stand for freedom, and they don't stand for democracy, and they don't stand for any of the values that being American means, regardless of whether they're conservative or liberal. They stand for themselves, and they are for censorship, and they're for government taking over our lives." 

Lamb concedes that for a demagogue to have an impact on a society there has to be an existing undercurrent of what he calls hysteria for that person to exploit. 

"I just take someone like that, I guess it's kind of like crab grass or something like that, if you don't put the stuff on them the crab grass will keep growing, and I just think she's, actually she's worse than crab grass," Lamb said. "McCain would not have brought that on. And I just think it was a lot of things. It was the idea that the economy fell apart, it was the idea of Obama, a black man running for president, I think brought out some of the deep-seated feelings, but I think she coalesced that mob and brought them together. I'm not sure anyone else could have created this hysteria that she did."

Wow!  Worse than crab grass, well I can't argue against that!

I think I may have identified the next book I need to add to my library.
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