Ok, now it’s just weird.

I’ve been following politics for a while now, since Ford became President.  He took office on my 7th birthday.  It’s a condition boarding on obsession.  It’s probably not healthy in the long run, but what the hell.  I gave up diet coke, American politics is my only vice left.

Having said that, I must say the current situation is possibly the oddest thing I have ever witnessed.  I’m not talking about all the crisis surrounding the Obama administration, that’s just incredibly disappointing.  I’m talking about the strange bedfellows the scandals have created.

I mentioned it on our last podcast, but it has gotten even weirder since then.

Now, even Dick Cheney has pulled up a pillow.  Yeah, that Dick Cheney.  But lets start from the top.

The National Security Administration got caught data mining all of our phone calls by using a “secret” warrant.  With the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, bent on the destruction of Obama and his administration, you would think they would be foaming at the mouth over this.  You would think they would be calling for an impeachment.  So far, crickets from them.

One of their supposed leaders in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, (R) SC, said on FOX-n-Friends that he had no problem with the NSA listening into his calls.  Graham said he doesn’t understand why people would have a problem with this if they have done nothing wrong.  Amazing.  The constitution is weeping. The actual document is shedding tears right now.

Senator Mitch McConnell, (R) Ky, made it clear in 2009 that all of his effort would be spent making Obama a one term president. The hell with the poor and jobless, Mitch wanted to bring down Obama.  So this seems like a great opportunity for ole Mitch to do some serious damage to the President.  If he was on radio you would think you were listening to Harry Reid, (D) NV and progressive leader of the Senate.  In other words McConnell’s mortal enemy.  Mitch stopped just short of saying, “I fully support the president on this.”

I need to take a shower.

Too late anyway, former Bush 43 press secretary Are Fliescher beat Mitch to it when he said exactly that.  But Ari didn’t stop with the NSA stuff, he elaborated to say he also supported the drone strike campaign the President has been using to target Americans abroad for execution. When you get Fleischer in bed with you, you’re…, you’re… well you’re just not having a good 2nd term.

Look man, even Glenn Beck got in on it. Except he went the other way.  He attacked FOX news and a lot of republicans.  Beck is calling Edward Snowden a hero.  Which is odd because Beck called Bradley Manning, the wiki-leaker, a traitor.  But calling Snowden a hero puts Beck at odds with a lot of the conservative movement and in league with a lot of progressives who have turned on the President for basically running Bush era programs.

Obama’s brother from another mother.

If that wasn’t confusing enough, I bring you back to Darth, er I mean Dick Cheney.  He goes on FOX News Sunday and says he’s with Obama on this one.

Yeah, let that sink in for a minute.

I mean Obama has been blaming Bush for everything since O’s inauguration speech. Which, by default, blames Cheney.  And actually, a lot of people refer to Cheney as the 43rd President, not Bush.  Anyway, I was just stunned to hear Cheney defend Obama on this issue.

All the scandals are bad enough, but now we have dogs sleeping with cats, tea partiers siding with progressives, it’s complete anarchy.  Where will it all end?  And more importantly how the hell are we supposed to keep track of all this?

When it was the simple minded tea partiers led by Trump and Hupp’s girlfriend, Sarah Palin, it was easy to keep up.  Those knuckleheads were chasing down some Kenyan birth certificate and blaming Muslims for everything.  Turns out they were just running a smokescreen for Obama’s real agenda which was carrying out Bush’s policies.

When the Occupy Wall Street hippies decided to stop bathing, live on the street, and someone else pay their tuition, the players were obvious.  The lines between the parties were clear and the aim point for our anger and derision was as big as could be.

Well now it’s just one big muddled mess.  Who am I supposed to insult and denigrate now?  Without a scorecard it’s just too hard to keep up.

So, in the next week we will chart the scandals and then list out who’s with or against the President and post it right here at Unfiltered and Unfettered.  That way we can hate the players and the game more efficiently.

Gonna be a lot of work.

Thanks a lot Obama.

Damage Control: Set Phasers to Spin.

Actually spinning news that’s bad for you into not so bad or even good news doesn’t take a phaser, or even any science at all.  It does require a lot of fiction smothered in lies.

The most obvious example is the first presidential debate of course.  The Obama team was in full spin control minutes after the debate ended.  The three blind mice actually blamed the moderator for Obama’s poor performance.  Tsk, tsk, tsk.  A good carpenter never blames his moderator, or something like that.

Then we had Al Gore claiming altitude sickness for Obama.  Man-Bear-Pig!  Click the link, watch the video.  You will be incomplete until you do.

And then some left wing nut jobs claimed Romney had a cheat sheet, as evidenced by a super slow-mo replay of him putting his hands on the podium at the start of the debate. It’s not even worth linking to. The Zapruder film is like High Def compared to that stupid clip. Google it young people.  Turns out is was his handkerchief, although it may have been Obama’s long form birth certificate, hard to tell.

The media was surprisingly forthright about it.  Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who has the biggest and most unhealthy man-crush on the President, just about called Obama a freaking loser.  His hissy fit was epic.  Watch it here: Matthews rant 

But then they had a day to recover.  Tired of trying to spin a terrible performance by Obama and a stellar performance by Romney, they, meaning the media, took to the lazy man’s spin – call the other guy a liar.  It’s so sad and embarrassing I don’t think it requires analysis.  Calling Mitt Romney a liar because he crushed Obama in the debate just stands on its own.

Then we have the other guys, known as Conservatives.  It’s hard sometimes, to discern who has the biggest pile of loons, conservatives or liberals.   (It’s really the libertarians, but they are very sensitive so we don’t like to mention it.)

What was the only thing that might cut short the Romney celebration of his great debate performance – the jobs report.  The report came out Friday and it was a little startling. It showed the US had added 114, 000+ jobs in September, pushing the unemployment number down to 7.8.  That’s a big mental barrier.  First time it’s been below 8% in forever.  But there are a lot of factors contributing to that number.  People stop looking, it’s not adjusted for the type, pay, and longevity of jobs, etc…  The actual number with all those and a myriad of other factors is more likely somewhere north of 10% unemployment.  But this formula that gave us 7.8 on Friday is the same formula that showed dismal numbers in July and August.

What is absolutely not contributing to the lower unemployment rate is number fixing by the Obama camp.  But you wouldn’t know that if you have a twitter account or watch any political television.

So it goes like this.  A prominent CEO, Jack Welch, a Romney financial advisor, takes to twitter to accuse the people in Chicago of cooking the unemployment figures.  The sheep who follow that right wing nut job jump on the conspiracy band wagon and it’s off to the races.  Never mind that Romney’s spokesperson is on CNBC’s Squawk in the Street business program saying in no way do they believe the nonsense about fixing, they just think the number is not accurate.  And Romney’s guy is right, for reasons mentioned above.  But not good enough for Jack.  Obama’s cooking the books he cries.  See his tweet below.

You don’t know Jack!

Not to be outdone, another genius CEO is heard from.

Mom: “Stevie!”
Forbes: “Well Jack said it too.”

Take at look at the amount of people who re-tweeted and favorited that one from Forbes. Now some of those people did it for the opposite reason, but I’ll bet a lot did it because they believe it.  Staggering to say the least.  I would be curious to poll those people about their feelings on the moon landing.  I may not want to hear the answer.

What I find most curious: where were these people when the same Labor dept. using the same numbers and formulas, came up with strikingly dismal numbers for July and August? Seems like they had the utmost confidence in the numbers then.  And there-in lies the problem when you deal in absolutes.  Once the situation swings back the other way, what do you do?  I’ll tell you what you do, you look like a freaking dope for all the world to see.

It’s similar to the gas price issue.  Newt, Glenn Beck, and a host of others were screaming with their hair on fire when gas got to $4.00.  Again, any right thinking person knows the President, any President or his administration, or congress for that matter, has 0.00% control over gas prices.  So where were those people, looking at you Newt and Glenn, when gas snuck down towards 2.99 in early summer?  It actually got under 3.00 in Knoxville but we are usually lower than the national norm on that.  So where were they? Shouldn’t they have been applauding the President for getting gas prices so low?  Yeah, not likely.  They were obviously silent on the matter.  Tougher question; where will they be when President Romney is staring $4.50 a gallon gasoline in the face.  Absolutes; great to get your mindless, unwashed, lemmings to riot when the absolute favors you.  Make you look pretty stupid when the pendulum swings the other way.

Well done Jack.  Nicely played Stevie.  You have confirmed yourselves as the Sith Lords we all figured you were.

Because as every 5th grader knows, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” – Obi Wan Kenobi.

Absolute video evidence Welch and Forbes are the Sith Lords we’ve been looking for. – click it!