Your one stop, Happy New Year, pundit shop.
Eugene Robinson uses the word that too many journalists are afraid of -- lies:
It's pathetic to break a New Year's resolution before we even get to New Year's Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney's corrosive and nonsensical outbursts -- that I would treat them, more or less, like the pearls of wisdom one hears from homeless people sitting in bus shelters.
But he is a former vice president, which gives him a big stage for his histrionic Rottweiler-in-Winter act. It is never a good idea to let widely disseminated lies and distortions go unchallenged. And the shrill screed that Cheney unloosed Wednesday is so full of outright mendacity that, well, my resolution will have to wait.
In a statement to Politico, Cheney seemed to be trying to provide talking points for opponents of the Obama administration who -- incredibly -- would exploit the Christmas Day terrorist attack for political gain. Cheney's broadside opens with a big lie, which he then repeats throughout. It is as if he believes that saying something over and over again, in a loud enough voice, magically makes it so.
Read the whole thing.
Gail Collins looks back at 2009:
But things really slowed down when we got to health care. Remember the Blue Dog Democrats holding the bill hostage in the House? The bipartisan panel of six senators who spent the summer sending back reports on what a great conference call they had had last Tuesday?
Remember Olympia Snowe? Whatever happened to her?
Remember the Ben Nelson crisis, and the Joe Lieberman crisis, and the plan from the freshman Democrats, and the plan from the moderates, and the revolt of the conservative Democrats and the revolt of the progressive Democrats? Boy, those were fun times. I bet Majority Leader Harry Reid is reliving them right now while he spends New Year’s Eve on the floor of his bedroom in a fetal position.
The job of governing jumped from difficult to impossible after those right-wing tea parties last summer, which eliminated any Republican notions that if a president won a big election victory and large majorities in the House and Senate then that might be a sign of the American people wanting him to succeed.
No more. This might allow one to theorize that Glenn Beck wrecked our year if we did not already know it was Joe Lieberman.
E.J. Dionne looks at the past decade and says:
Americans instinctively recoil at living too much in the past. Yet we have no choice but to reach a settlement about the meaning of the last 10 years. It is the only way we will successfully turn the next 10 into a decade of renewal.
Roger Cohen on the situation in Iran:
Back in February, I wrote: “The Islamic Republic has not birthed a totalitarian state; all sorts of opinions are heard. But it has created a society whose ultimate bond is fear. Disappearance into some unmarked room is always possible.” That was too much for the Iran-as-Nazi-incarnation-of-evil school, who cast me as an appeaser.
I also wrote that, “The irony of the Islamic Revolution is that it has created a very secular society within the framework of clerical rule. The shah enacted progressive laws for women unready for them. Now the opposite is true: Progressive women face confining jurisprudence. At some point something must give.”
With the birth of the Green movement, and in the spirit of Montazeri, something has given. The further, critical “giving” has to come in the supreme leader’s office, where the 30 percent error of 1979 has entrenched itself and so denied Iran the governance and society its vibrant population deserves.
Daniel Henninger continues his ongoing series about why he hates America -- the one he started sometime around January 20, 2009.
Matthew Bernstein describes the first 10 years of the 21st century as the "you" decade:
The 1970S were the Me Decade. The first 10 years of the 21st century are due for a pronoun of their own - one born of the computer age and its power to set free the individual. These last 10 years will be dubbed, inevitably, the You Decade. After all, no matter where you went, there you were - on YouTube, on Facebook, on Twitter, or in silhouette in the early iPod ad, gyrating with abandon, earbuds tuned to - who else? - U2. And when you had something to say, there was nothing holding you back from reaching millions. You could read about carnage in Sri Lanka or hear about teacher layoffs in your local school district, and with but a tap and click, you could enter the debate. Or start it.
Karl Rove again peddles his bullshit politicization of last week's attempted terrorist attack:
... to Mr. Obama's staff: The Norwegian Nobel Committee didn't want to wake the president to tell him about his prize earlier this year, but there shouldn't be any reluctance to reassure the nation after a terrorist attack.
When Rove makes the rounds this weekend on the TV talk shows, will any "journalists" bother to ask him about George W. Bush's week-long silence after a nearly identical attempted attack in 2001?
Hypocritical piece of flotsam.