Comedian Jay Pharoah won’t go down as one of Saturday Night Live’s best presidential mimics. How could he?

The talented comic never lays a satirical glove on the president thanks to a writing team which refuses to take tough but fair shots at the president or his policies.

Emphasis mine.

This is one of the right’s top websites. They are also idiots. Do the math.

From Breitbart.com before today:

If you are involved in the commission of a crime, you don’t get to magically yell “press” and have the issue pass by. While there’s no role for the government in suppressing speech, the government has a vested interest in fighting crime.

The press does not have special powers not afforded to the rest of us. If you have material relevant to a crime and think that magical source protection applies, there’s no constitutional right to a confidential source.

Even worse, we live in an era where the artificial distinction between professionalized journalism and journalism created by amateurs has been obliterated. You aren’t magically “press” because you print something on paper and have a (dwindling) amount of people who pay you for it.

That’s why you can’t have this protected class of First Amendment practitioners. The Constitution protects us all but it doesn’t elevate the professional press above the rest of us.

I supported investigations into the leaking of classified national security material under the Bush administration, and while I do think there’s a legitimate issue about over classification of information, I believe that the law is the law and you work knowing the consequences of flaunting that. Even when I agree that the information morally should be exposed, those who leak this sort of classified information must deal with the legal consequences of their actions, professional press or not.

Putting aside just how phony these “scandals” are, based on the faux history the right has peddled for decades now, shouldn’t they be cheering?

Because up until recently, the right had Nixon as the good guy. The original sin of the supposed “liberal media” was railroading Richard Nixon out of office, amplifying the break-in and subsequent abuse of power to the level of a “high crime.” This resulted in the only President to resign in disgrace, an eternal blot on the Republican Party.

So thorough was the right’s fake Nixon narrative that several of his co-conspirators – Chuck Colson and G. Gordon Liddy – went on to prosperous second acts within the conservative community.

But now, on a dime, they’ve turned and adopted the mainstream modern narrative on Nixon. Because it benefits them to attack Obama, suddenly Nixon is back to being the bad guy. The same people who wave the bloody flag of bias over the Nixon era have suddenly found value in attaching it to the fake scandals they attribute to the Obama administration.

It’s very much like the party of gutting and killing Medicare attacking Obama for supposedly cutting Medicare. Or the party of not capturing Bin Laden attacking Obama for being soft on terrorism.

It is yet another example of a party and movement untethered from reality and willing to discard its long-built narrative in favor of temporary (eventually fruitless) outrage and rhetoric.

I have no doubt that after these attacks on Obama come up empty (as they did with Clinton), the narrative will reset and Nixon will go back to being the victim, for as long as it is convenient.

Their own media outlets tell them that this ignorance is a virtue, and that the world is just biased against them thanks to liberals in the media and academia. It’s the kind of thinking that leads the top conservative think tank in all of America to hire a guy with ties to white supremacists to co-author their centerpiece “study” on immigration reform.

They don’t think, for a second, to check into the guy’s background. And if they did, they might not even have thought that these types of affiliations raised red flags. They exist in a world in which there is no racial or ethnic or sexual bias, except that ginned up by the liberals.

And when that sensibility runs smack dab into reality, it’s a hell of a thing.

Conservatism is a cocoon shut off from reality. It can only succeed when the very groups that increasingly comprise the future of this country don’t show up at the polls. It makes no effort – no serious effort – to appeal to these groups and derides such work as “pandering” while stoking resentment amongst its dying base.

And that is how you end up hiring someone with ties to white supremacists, who attacked ethnic immigrants as prone to low IQs and high crime, to write your study – filled with nonsense even Republicans called out – opposing immigration.

This is what modern conservatism has become, and it is going to get worse.

That’s how these things operate. While the GOP got angry when people asked questions about the wrong war of choice they initiated, they insist that there are “questions” yet to be answered after a series of investigations, hearings, and more that revealed details about the attack but delivered a giant nothingburger as far as political scandal.

The two major hearings on this so far were supposed to “answer questions” but instead were the usual Congressional exercise in posturing before asking witnesses nominal questions. As previously noted, the back to back Clinton hearings simply allowed the GOP to stamp their feet over losing the election, while yesterday’s show contrasted understandably distraught civil servants with Republicans grasping for this generation’s Whitewater.

So now they have more questions, and we’ll be treated to yet another round of Republicans stoking the fire on Fox News, acting in mock anguish as they just want their “questions” answered.

It’s no coincidence that conspiracy theorists usually go on at length about the “questions” they have. The supposed unanswered questions about the 9/11 attacks – “we don’t know what really happened” – are still rolling on 12 years later, and they’ll never stop because absolutely nothing can actually answer them.

The right doesn’t care about the actual attacks, they just want something to compensate for their inability to win a presidential election for the second contest in a row.

They have questions.

Previously, on Benghazi!

Hillary Clinton, in her last appearance before Congressional committees as Secretary of State, was supposed to collapse at the feet of her GOP inquisitors, helpless before them as they posed for the cameras and delivered Fox-generated storylines. In reality, Clinton’s testimony resembled Neo from the Matrix, batting away nonsense and helping to remind the world why she has a historical legacy of her own apart from her husband.

Now with the latest dog and pony show, we will be treated to more GOP harrumphing and more Fox News alerts that will largely be about old, well-worn nonsense that the conservative media will treat as bombshells but turn out to be nothingburgers.

Pardon my grizzled cynicism, but I have seen this storyline before, with Clinton and Whitewater and breathless mumbles of scandal from the mainstream press that turned out to be nothing.

Today’s belt-tightened press corps is comprised of many easy-led by the nose veterans along with young pups who could barely vote in the 2008 election, let alone have any context for the Republican scandal machine of the late 1990s.

The same people who clutched their pearls at the idea of a bipartisan investigation of 9/11 would now like us to believe that the sanctity of the republic is at stake because of multiple versions of talking points. They have more anger towards those who edited a document than the attackers who took the lives of our diplomats.

It’s all as fake as the claim that a tiny Arkansas land deal was an abuse of power. I’ve seen this show before, it sucks and it’s a perversion of our government. In other words, standard issue conservative politics.

One of the right’s scholars (aka, a hack) wrote an entire book about Democrats being “the party of death.”

He wrote and promoted this book as George W. Bush’s strategy in Iraq led to the deaths of thousands of unnecessary deaths in Iraq, naturally.

And that’s part of why the pro-life label doesn’t make logical sense. These are also the same people who do not believe in any exceptions to abortion law. Even when the life of a mother is in danger, the Republican Party’s platform calls for an absolute ban on abortion. That’s not “pro-life.”

By comparison, the majority opinion in the country and within the left is actually choice. We believe that a woman has a choice in what is done to and within her body. It is her choice whether she wants to terminate a pregnancy, and she shouldn’t be forced into that decision, especially not by a male-dominated legislative body.

The anti-abortion movement opposes this choice. They oppose choice, and we should strive towards clarity of language as much as we can. Maybe their feelings get hurt to be described as “anti-choice” but it is the most accurate, purest distillation of their position possible.

Tough.

What we don’t need, however, is John McCain banging the war drums yet again. Has there ever been a military conflict that McCain hasn’t agitated for? And must every news outlet stumbles all over themselves to give him a platform?

McCain is one of 100, yet you would think his vote in Arizona counted for half of the Senate, based on the way the media hypes him.  I think he’s been on TV more in the last two years than the time he failed to win the presidency. The second time he failed at that, I mean.

He was also spectacularly wrong about the biggest military conflict America has been involved in over the last 40 years, Iraq. And unlike many others – of both parties – who have acknowledged the folly of supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq, McCain is in the Bush-Cheney wing of history, forever committed to insisting that 4,000 dead American soldiers was worth it for WMD that didn’t exist.

I have problems with the Obama administration on some domestic policy, but I can’t find fault with them on foreign policy and national security, and their consistent dismissal of McCain’s frustrated, impotent war rage is a positive development.

There’s no media equivalent of the Phantom Zone, where those who are spectacularly wrong are sent off to wander in exile, but there should be. We should strive towards ignoring as best we can the people who get everything wrong, particularly when American lives are at stake.

If we want “country first” these are the last people to listen to.

Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

George W. Bush was easily the least qualified person in U.S. history to hold the presidency. Other failed presidents occasionally have one element of their tenure that they can hail as a success, but George W. Bush ended his presidency with failure on both domestic and foreign policy.

By the time he mercifully left office on January 20, 2009, thousands of American soldiers were unnecessarily dead, thousands of Iraqis were dead, and millions of Americans were out of work. That doesn’t even account for global instability thanks to the vacuum of leadership in the Bush White House.

Yet somehow, my fellow liberals are too soft in assessing Bush’s failure.

They claim that he was a puppet, a tool of other, craftier forces. Most often Cheney is invoked as the man behind the curtain, who used Bush to achieve his evil goals.

Wrong.

Bush is responsible. Bush was the President. Bush was the man who made the ultimate decision to invade Iraq, to do so with an incompetent fool like Donald Rumseld in charge. Bush chose not to react to the memo that warned him about Bin Laden’s plan to attack on 9/11. Bush chose to take resources away from fighting Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq. Bush chose to put industry cronies in key regulatory positions, including those who were supposed to be watching Wall Street. Bush chose to cut taxes for the super-rich without regard to its long-term effect on the U.S. economy. It was Bush who looked out of an airplane window with that same blank expression he always had, watching as New Orleans drowned.

At practically every critical juncture in his presidency, Bush made the decisions that lead to failure, death, and strife for Americans and people around the world. The buck stopped at his desk.

So when liberals lay the blame on people like Cheney, or Rice, or any of the other goons that ran amok in the White House for eight years, they’re letting the ultimate bad actor off the hook.

Bush is responsible for what happened. We shouldn’t ever forget that.

I got interested in the conspiracy that is the granddaddy of the modern conspiracy movement, the John F. Kennedy assassination, which was the dominant conspiracy theory until 9/11. The myths surrounding the Kennedy assassination set the table for the modern conspiracies that would follow, including the manner in which known facts are either dismissed or assimilated into a concrete “theory.”

A friend describes me as an Alex Jones hipster, someone who was well aware and entertained by America’s leading conspiracy theorist long before he started showing up on CNN or hanging out with Charlie Sheen. Jones is particularly skilled in the tactic that makes conspiracy theories sound believable to the converted, while opening the door to the interested.

(At this point I should stipulate that while Jones makes money off of these theories, I believe that he is a True Believer. If you listen to his radio show, he comes across as someone who honestly believes the insane things he’s saying – compared to someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has been phoning it in for nearly thirty years.)

What Jones does well is connect his conspiracy theories to a real thing. He’s just willing to take that leap a little further than a responsible normal person would take it. For instance, it isn’t in dispute that the U.S. government has intervened in the affairs of foreign nations in order to produce results that are more in favor with us geopolitically. Now, the difference is between those of us who acknowledge known, uncomfortable facts and the conspiracy theorist who cites these cases as evidence of a globe-spanning conspiracy that controls the levers of power.

It really is that simple. You take something that is true, and use it as a launching pad into what is ludicrous. Then when challenged, someone like Jones can always refer to the true fact, and ask the interested party if they can believe “X” then why can’t they believe “Y” which is at least an adjacent set of ideas.

Why are people willing to take that leap?

The world is a complex, scary place. It always has been, but nowadays it’s even more immediate and in our faces. Take 9/11, for instance. The idea that 19 mostly unarmed men could cause such chaos, death, and destruction does not compute. It almost begs for a more complex explanation. Why not remote controlled bombs, secret cannons, anonymous men in penthouse apartments ordering the extermination of innocent lives? That, in an odd way, makes way more “sense” than what really happened.

A conspiracy is the mind’s way of dealing with a world that seems to be turned on its ear. And how does one get roped into belief? Well, we know our government does things we’ve never heard about, so is it that great a leap to imagine an entire succession of absurd, horrible things done in the name of our government and secretive corporations?

Which leads to why you shouldn’t believe conspiracy theories.

I’ve come to be a strong believer in Occam ’s razor, that is, given multiple explanations for something the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK on his own.

James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King on his own.

9/11 happened almost exactly as we saw it play out on our television screens.

And on and on. The real world is messy and chaotic and works without rhyme or reason. Sure, it somehow feels better to think that there are men behind the curtain orchestrating false reality, but it really isn’t likely.

Stuff just… happens. A marathon in a major city explodes into chaos, and as thousands witness the event in person and through mass and social media, the odds are that it happened exactly as we perceived it. There wasn’t any “false flag” or other, nefarious occurrences, but rather early reports that proved to be false because human beings are humans and not characters in a movie or television script.

While bad people and organizations do engage in horrible behavior in concert with one another, the very same human chaos also works against these grand conspiracies actually ever working out. The sheer amount of people who would have to play along to keep an event like 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination quiet works against the theory.

A bad thing happened. Let’s deal with that and leave the wild conspiracy around it to wither on the vine.