Note the highest response was to the question of whether Islam is “at odds with American values.” That is the essence of culture war: “they” cannot live with “us,” and to prove it “we” will stop “them” from building a community center or a house of worship to live alongside us. Such action will violate our own values, but will prevent any new understanding of their values from threatening to undo our ignorant fear of their values. See how that works?

By Magic Love Hose

(I am going to use the phrase ‘turtle fucking’ a lot in this post. You were warned.)

Every year, in America, in the sweltering August heat, politics gets insane. Matt & I have talked about how subsidized air conditioning would do a hell of a lot for the sanity of U.S. politics. Last year it was a mosque at Ground Zero that was not a mosque and not at Ground Zero, and the year before that it was death panels. This year we got the debt ceiling deal which I’ve said my piece on (I hate it) and that was mostly it, until we hit August the 31st.

On August the 31st, the not-mosque and the death panels looked at the “Date of Obama’s Jobs Speech” controversy and went “Damn, son. You got us beat.” The short version is that either Obama is a weak and horrible President for agreeing to move the day of his joint address of Congress to after the Republican national debate, or he is a super-skilled Batman level tactician who did all this knowing what the reaction of every single player involved, including you, would be and has made Boehner look like a fool.

There, you’re all caught up on the last forty-eight hours of progressive blogging. Don’t you feel smarter for having engaged in this gripping discussion? I sure as hell do. Seriously, if you put Lex Luthor in a lab and told him to engineer the world’s least consequential political shitstorm, he would come out with this.

I fall on the side of “he shouldn’t have moved the speech.” But it doesn’t matter. The date of the speech doesn’t matter, and here’s why.

Let’s imagine that the speech lives up to all our left-wing hopes and dreams and desires, and Barack Obama merges with the ghost of FDR like some political version of Firestorm the Nuclear Man and promises a jobs plan so good that Paul Krugman can’t sit down without tearing his trousers open. He ends the speech full of policy proposals so awesome that the music from the end of “Top Gun” plays over his final paragraph of delivery.

Here’s what happens next.

Fox News, the media outlet that turned “let’s make sure people don’t lose health insurance when they get sick” into Obama’s Gay Hitler Muslim Terrorist Turtle Fucking Block Party, announces that this jobs plan is Obama’s Gay Hitler Muslim Terrorist Turtle Fucking Block Party 2: Now He’s Come For Your Tortoises Also. They repeat this meme without contradiction, without hesitation, without a lick of the shame you’d find in any human being who scored less than a 40 on the psychopathy test, about twenty to thirty times a day, to a credulous audience of millions. This credulous audience come out to protest with graphic pictures of turtles being fucked.

These protests are picked up on CNN, where they note somberly that it seems an awful lot of people are concerned about turtle fucking in Obama’s proposed jobs bill. A few of their interchangable PunditBots will note that Obama has stated that his jobs plan does not, as it turn out, fuck turtles at all. Then there is a five minute discussion on whether or not Obama’s plan does fuck tortoises, at which point they conclude that Obama says one thing, Boehner says another, and welp, guess the answer’s somewhere in the middle. Maybe the turtles only get a little fucked. Who’s to say? Then we head into an hour of whatever Justin Bieber did, and whether or not he is an elaborate prank by Canada or not.

Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, they will carefully analyze the jobs plan and conclude that yeah, that was a hell of a speech, and the jobs plan does not include any turtle fucking at all, not any tortoise fucking, and shame on John Boehner for insinuating that it does. Then they will add that while the plan does not specifically fuck turtles, it doesn’t contain any funding for programs to prevent turtle fucking and comfort and treat fucked turtles. Therefore they cannot in good conscience fully advocate for the jobs proposals that Obama has laid out, but they end with the rallying cry of “it’s better than nothing, I guess.”

Progressives all over the United States are energized by this rallying cry, chanting “it’s better than nothing, we guess!” at rallies that are 200,000 strong. Just kidding, progressives will wonder why the Treatment for Turtle Fucking provisions aren’t in the proposals and endlessly debate whether or not the proposals are worth it without the provisions for the Treatment for Turtle Fucking. And even if they do get rallies 200,000 strong in favor of the proposals despite the lamentable lack of treatment for fucked turtles, CNN will not cover them, FOX News will misrepresent them, and MSNBC will feature them for one hour, one night of the week, which obviously is enough to counter Fox repeating the “Obama Fucks Turtles” meme twenty times a day, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, Congress just laughs so hard the jobs proposals die instantly.

That’s the political upside of the Go Big speech, a big whopping Nothing Whatsoever. A week later no one remembers it. The jobs proposals go nowhere. The effectiveness of going “all Harry Truman” on Congress and the Republicans never materializes for Obama because the media will either not help him make his point or will actively oppose it.

That’s the best case scenario, the “Obama Goes Big” scenario. The “Obama Goes With What Might Pass” scenario will dampen the spirits of progressives, and it still won’t go anywhere at all because the 112th Congress is living proof of how much elections matter. The 111th Congress? Most productive since LBJ. The 112th? Least productive since Truman. They are not suddenly going to see the light and walk hand in hand with Obama into the Age of Aquarius. We berate Obama for not seeing this, but we can be blind to it too – with a Congress this plumb-fuck useless, nothing is going to happen on policy so debating it is a waste of time even though we really, really need some motherfucking good policy right now. So to hell with policy. On politics, well, see “turtles, the fucking thereof.”

That’s why I don’t care if this speech falls on a Wednesday or a Thursday. When it’s bound to do not a lick of good, it’s hard to search within you for fucks to give. I hope I’m wrong. God, I hope I’m wrong. But be honest: the only reason Fox News hasn’t yet thought about hanging the words ‘turtle fucker’ around Obama’s neck is because the FCC, unlike Fox, has standards.

Magic Love Hose is not a professional politician. You can trust him because of in spite of that. He has a website and a Twitter and is 60% sure how to use them.

Guess what? Wisconsin agrees with the protesters over Governor Walker, and Indiana Democrats are doing the same thing. So as far as I’m concerned, FOX Noise can keep right on pushing their fake spin and framing — it only further exposes them as tools of the Koch-sucking oligarchy.

Jason Linkins at HuffPo took note of the FOX News website’s attempt to purge the image of teabaggery:

PETOSKEY, Mich. — The Tea Party Express has toured state after state trying to kick up a debate about constitutional rights and cast doubt on the legality of the recently passed health care overhaul, all with an eye toward the 2010 elections.

But while organizers have held the tour as a way to stay front-and-center as a political force, the rallies have also attracted the kinds of mistruths, exaggerations and conspiracy theories that make Tea Party leaders cringe. Though the movement is still trying to shore up its credentials as a grassroots power that’s here to stay, the so-called “fringe” and its accompanying antics continue to give critics fodder.

Just as the astroturf organizations have sanitized their image, the Tea Party Express has managed to remove the most disgusting signs from its magical mystery tour. Yet, as we saw on Easter Sunday, there’s still plenty of ugliness and insanity on offer at a TPE event…and very little in the way of facts.

FOX is still whitewashing. After all, if you actually ejected the John Bircher stupidity from Murdoch’s signal you’d have to lose Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, both of whom have big contracts with FOX.

“For the first time in our 14 years we’ve had people apparently shooting in the tent, from within the tent,” TVNewser quotes Ailes as saying to the Washington bureau. “Glenn Beck does his show and that’s his opinion. It’s not the opinion of FOX News and he has a right to say it. We prefer people in the tent not dumping on other people in the tent.”

For the first time in television history, a John Bircher tees off the primetime lineup on a major news network. The “tent” is a circus of paranoid delusion, but don’t mind the evil clown in your midst — he’s entitled to his opinion.