Here’s what we covered at The Daily Banter this week.

Ben Cohen brought us another edition of Glenn Beck comment porn; he ripped Dick Cheney’s remarks on Benghazi; and he noted that Bill Maher doesn’t understand black people.

Oliver Willis ripped the Republicans for their Nixon narrative against Obama; and he destroyed the sense of entitlement among the professional press.

Alyson Chadwick criticized the president for the AP scandal; and she covered the truth about Benghazi.

Chez Pazienza saluted CBS News for revealing how the Republicans leaked selectively edited emails about Benghazi; he warned the Kitchen Nightmares people to not f**k with the internet; he applauded Angelina Jolie’s decision to undergo a double mastectomy; and he defended Patton Oswalt against the Age of Outrage.

Kojo Koram reminded us that there was a mass shooting last weekend which everyone seemed to ignore.

I covered the Republican lies about Obamacare; I wrote about the precedent for the IRS and the AP scandals established by Republicans; and I listed 10 instances in which Republicans abused government power for political retribution.

Have a great weekend!

Bob Cesca,
Managing Editor

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In this weeks edition of ‘Glenn Beck Comment Porn’ we look at his reader’s reactions to an article on Pat Robertson and submissive women. The televangelist had got himself into a whole heap of trouble when he declared that women who have been cheated on by their husbands should stop dwelling on the cheating and “make a home so wonderful that he doesn’t want to wander”.

Reader’s of Glenn Beck’s site ‘The Blaze’ weighed in with their usual combination of wit, intelligence and compassion, offering the following gems all women should take to the bank.

MIKEINLEEDS agreed with Robertson, arguing that most men he knows who “has (sic) cheated is mainly because women are not submissive anymore”:

MODERN_CICERO said that only Jesus Christ can stop men cheating:

CAVALLO warned that getting married in the first place is a bad idea, likening marriage to entering a ‘lion’s den’:

And TERM LIMITS FOR CONGRESS reminded the woman who was cheated on should be grateful she isn’t married to a muslim: 

Until next week….

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One of the most inexcusable problems with the modern press is that it collectively allows politicians and political parties who traffic in bullshit to do so unchecked. The whole idea of the Fourth Estate, the reason it’s specifically protected within the Constitution, is that it’s supposed to stand as a bulwark against leaders who would ostensibly lie their asses off to our faces if they could. These days, they can — and they know they can — because the media that’s supposed to protect us spend most of their time sleeping the day away under the guise of being fair and impartial. We see this constantly, most obviously whenever a news outlet simply parrots each side of the political debate rather than dissecting what’s being said to find out who the hell is telling the truth and who’s entirely full of shit.

Well, last night, as Josh Marshall over at TPM reports, something surprising and pretty impressive happened: CBS News’s Major Garrett called out the Republicans for trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes when it comes to the ridiculous ongoing non-story that is Benghazi. Last week, Republicans on the Hill breathlessly claimed to have found a smoking gun in their silly seven-month-long witch hunt aimed at hitting on something that would stick not only to President Obama but also to Hillary Clinton, who they know is likely going to clean their clocks in 2016. They claimed to have gotten access to a series of White House e-mails which showed that the talking points the Obama administration was going public with following the September attack had been edited and watered down in an effort to make the White House and the State Department look blameless leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Someone on the inside issued quotes to the press from these supposed e-mails and of course the political press — specifically ABC’s Jonathan Karl — being the lapdogs that they are, ran with them. The result was that, yes, the GOP looked like it was kind of right all along and the White House was hiding something.

Here’s the thing, though: The actual e-mails were released a couple of days ago, and — surprise, surprise — it turns out the Republicans had exaggerated what was in them to the point of just about creating an entirely fictional narrative. The gambit the GOP was engaging in by “leaking” the e-mails to the press was the height of political cynicism: It knew that what matters is what’s reported first, that corrections generally don’t even happen and when they do no one really pays much attention since the damage is already done. It’s impossible to un-ring the bell when you’re talking about people frothing at the mouth to believe anything negative about Barack Obama and his administration. With that in mind, the press often just stays quiet, even with the sudden uncovering of new revelations, and lets the original narrative stay in place because, well, what the hell.

Last night, though, Major Garrett reported on the information in the real White House e-mails, the information that proves that what was leaked last week — likely by a Republican staffer who’d only taken a brief look at the e-mails and was quoting them from “memory” — was mostly nonsense. The reality of what the White House was saying in the communications about Benghazi was nowhere near as damning or damaging as the right would have you believe. This should come as no surprise at all, given that these days the Republicans are the party of birth certificates, and teleprompter jokes, and straight-faced claims that Benghazi was worse than 9/11 and a non-scandal at the IRS is an impeachable offense that makes Watergate and Teapot Dome look like a pair of free tickets to a ball game provided to the local police chief, and on and on and on.

CBS did something that should be standard for any news organization, but which, let’s face it, isn’t these days. So good for Major Garrett and good for CBS. If more journalists followed their lead, the political hucksters of today’s Republican party would be forced to clean up their acts or go out of business.

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Welcome to this weeks edition of The Daily Banter mailbag!! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss Obama’s craptastical week, the IRS and AP scandals, and the nutbags from this week’s Kitchen Nightmares.

1. How much trouble is President Obama in? He’s looking down the barrel of not one or two but THREE scandals that seem to be the real deal. Any predictions?
– Bill

Bob: You think Benghazi is “the real deal?” Wow. It’s really the purview of conspiracy theorists and fringe nutbags and nothing will come of it. There’s no evidence of a cover-up or what exactly the cover-up would’ve tried to disguise. The worst thing about the Benghazi situation is that it’ll fade away only to be resurrected in all its glory when and if Hillary Clinton dives into the 2016 fracas. Nevertheless, you should try to avoid referring to Benghazi as “the real deal.” It only enables and empowers the Republican noise machine.

Chez: They’re the real deal because the Republicans say they’re the real deal — and they said the same thing about teleprompters and birth certificates. True, there’s potentially more meat to the IRS dust-up, although nowhere near as much as the GOP would like you to believe, and the AP issue shows how strong-willed the Obama White House is when it comes to keeping a leash on the political press, but in the end these “scandals” still don’t amount to much. For me, I have to admit, it comes down to not only what’s really going on but who’s doing the complaining. The Republicans will elevate anything to Watergate level and that’s laughable in this case, the Tea Party people who are complaining about the IRS a) hate the IRS anyway, and b) probably deserved extra scrutiny as supposedly tax exempt groups. As for the AP, yeah, I know I should be really pissed about Obama fucking over the press but the press doesn’t do its goddamn job these days anyway. I’m really tired right now, by the way.

Ben: While I think this is most definitely a shitty week for the President, it will all blow over in a couple of weeks. Personally, I think the President has close to no culpability whatsoever when it comes to Benghazi and the IRS scandal. The Benghazi stuff is laughable and the IRS going after Tea Party had nothing to do with Obama (and anyway, fuck the Tea Party – why should they get tax exempt status? Exactly what social good are they doing?). However, spying on the press is a big deal in my book, and Obama deserves to get raked over the coals for it. The problem is, the Republicans are making such a hullabaloo over the other non-issues that anything vaguely legitimate gets lost in the cacophony. And that means it will disappear when everyone gets sick of it.

2. Am I the only one who thinks that both the IRS and AP scandals are much ado about nothing?
– Katie

Ben: See my answer above for the IRS scandal. To expand on the AP scandal however, I do think it’s another worrying example of the Obama Administrations disregard for civil liberties. I’m not a militant civil libertarian, but part of what makes the US great (at least in my opinion) is its very strict laws regarding freedom of speech for both citizens and the press. To as great an extent as possible, I think the press should be left well alone by the government. Of course there are exemptions, but spying on journalists was a pretty egregious abuse of power and shouldn’t happen again.

Bob: You’re not alone. They’re what I like to call “contained” mistakes in so far as, yes, some lower-level people screwed up, but I think we’ll discover over the next several months that there’s no connectivity to the White House. In terms of the AP thing, no laws were broken. Not one. However, it remains a First Amendment problem and hopefully the forthcoming media shield law will resolve it. The U.S. attorney cast too wide a dragnet and hopefully will be held accountable. Meanwhile, the IRS situation is similar in that we’re talking about two guys in Cincinnati who didn’t break any laws, even though they didn’t cast their dragnet wide enough. That said, no tea party groups were denied tax exempt status (now that’s criminal), while several Democratic groups were denied. Knowing this, um, what’s the “scandal” again?

Chez: See answer to question #1.

3. When can we expect the Daily Banter to hire that woman from “Kitchen Nightmares” to be a regular contributor?
– Troy

Chez: Man, I really hope soon. I’d love to see that. Ben?

Ben: Yep, I’m on it. Anything for pageviews.

Bob: She shouldn’t be allowed to prepare and serve food to the public, much less be hired anywhere else. But, predictably, she and her enabler husband will probably get their own reality show, not unlike the screaming family on American Chopper. We love watching people losing their shpadoinkle. So, yeah, reality show in 5… 4… 3…

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Monstrous liar Dick Cheney is at it again (spirit of america / Shutterstock.com)

Dick Cheney will rightly go down as one of the most despised figures in American political history. The ruthlessly cold neo con was one of the major architects of the Iraq War and the ‘War on Terror’, and used his power in office to do an astonishing amount of damage at home and abroad. Cheney represents cartoon character evilness – a sinister, lying bastard who would sell his own mother if it meant more power.

After his turn in office, Cheney has thankfully disappeared for the most part. But the Dark Lord has returned to offer his poisonous opinion on the so called Benghazi scandal, adding to the mounting bullshit coming from Republicans in a pathetically obvious attempt to smear Obama. Speaking with Sean Hannity via phone, Cheney told the Fox News host that he thought Benghazi was “One of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career.”

It seems Cheney may have forgotten one small event that happened on his watch (here’s a clue):

Never one for self reflection, Cheney continued, “It put the whole capability claiming the terrorist problem solved once we got Bin Laden, that Al Qaeda was over with. If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for re-election.”

Never mind the fact that there is absolutely no proof of this WHATSOEVER. As Max Read at Gawker points out after State Department memos were released:

The memos don’t make the State Department look noble, but they also show that before and throughout the revision process the top talking point across all memos was still about spontaneous protests—and that the motivation was more inter-agency cover-your-ass jockeying than protecting Obama.

So Cheney has literally pulled this out of his ass.

Not satisfied with the accusation that the Obama administration were attempting to gloss over events in Benghazi, Cheney went on to claim that the White House told direct lies to the American public about what happened. “They lied,” he went on. “They claimed it was because of a demonstration video, that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence. They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they need more security. They reduced what was already there.”

Again, if you look at the facts, this is utter horseshit. The released emails show that the CIA itself originally believed it to be a spontaneous attack. As Salon notes:

While references to terrorism were removed at the behest of the State Department, the CIA’s original draft of the talking points stated that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” In fact, all 12 drafts did.

It’s clear now that some people in the administration, including those on the ground, believed it was a terror attack from the get-go, but the CIA’s job is to synthesize disparate and often conflicting intelligence and make its best guess about the truth. So even if there was conflicting intelligence, the White House was correct in saying they were merely following the intelligence community’s lead, as they have maintained all along, by blaming the attack on a protest.

But no, facts will not suffice for Mr Cheney who insists on creating a totally new reality where actual evidence is disregarded in favor of whatever he wants it to be.

“The cover up included several officials up to and including President Obama and the cover up is still ongoing,” said Cheney.

So desperate to cover up the scandal that they released all the emails  to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees….

The memos released do show that there were mistakes made in regards to the events in Benghazi – there’s clear evidence that there was a lot of inter-agency back and forth between the State Department, the White House and the CIA that resulted in references to terrorism being removed from initial public briefings. But so what? As the administration learned more, it accepted the facts that it was indeed a terrorist attack and told the public so.

The truth is that some people believed it to be a terrorist attack from the get go, and some didn’t. The White House waited for the State Department and the CIA to give them a briefing to run with, and that happened to be one without reference to terrorism. And that’s about it.

Cheney running with this line of attack is particularly annoying for anyone living in the real world given the monstrous lies he told while in office. As WashingtonsBlog notes, Cheney:

• Falsely linked Iraq with 9/11 (indeed, the entire torture program was aimed at establishing such a false linkage; and Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. The former director of the CIA said Cheney oversaw American torture policies)

• Falsely claimed that spying on Americans, torture, the Patriot Act, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war and the “war on terror” were all necessitated by 9/11 … when all of them started or were planned before 9/11

• Falsely stated that an attack such as 9/11 was unforeseeable, when Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen

• Falsely pretended that he was out of the loop during the 9/11 attacks

• Falsely blamed others for 9/11, when Cheney was in charge of all of America’s counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement and this CNN article

So it’s no surprise that the liar Dick Cheney is telling lies about other people telling lies.

It’s what he does.

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A Day in the life of Kim Kardashian as seen by Kessica Kurst

Dear Kdiary,

Let me tell you, today has been a crazy day. If it wasn’t for my two assistants and my sisters (you know, Kourtney and Khloe – isn’t it hilarious we all have K names? My mom (Kris) was so clever like that. That’s how I knew it would work with Kanye. It was written in the kstars) I don’t know how I would have made it through.

I started off by waking up. That was hard. I’m like pregnant now and so it makes me want to just lie in bed all day –but then I think, how will I be photographed if I’m in my own house just lying around? See, I’m not so silly after all.

So, I thought, what can guarantee me a good photo opportunity? I had two options. Firstly, I can wear something ridiculous. That’s a given now. Or me going to the gym seems to really get some good photos.

That reminds me, I can’t wait to do my People magazine shoot with the baby (Is North such a bad name? North West-Kardashian. Kind of has a ring to it right?) and I’ll talk about how hard it was being pregnant – what with the cravings and all. And then, only a few short weeks later after being in the gym for nine hours a day and I’ve starved myself and drunk cayenne pepper mixed with monkey urine and I’ve miraculously lost all my baby weight, I’ll have my follow-up photo shoot where I can admit to it being really tough and depending on how desperate I am, maybe “shockingly reveal” to shedding a few tears because I’m tired and emotional.

So Kdiary, in a moment of sheer genius I came up with this: I walked Kanye in to a street sign! Hilare! It was so perfect because the sign even said ‘Caution’ on it. I know that will run and run for a while. Plus he totally blamed the paparazzi and had no idea it was me! I’m so clever.

What’s really handy is that wherever I seem to go, paparazzi follow me! I don’t know how they know where I am when all I’ve done is text them my exact location and what time I’ll be leaving or arriving. It’s so weird! If they get too annoying I like to put something on Ktwitter to make sure my kfans know I’m real. There’s 17 million people waiting to know if I’m ok and everything.

Sometimes I totally wish for the quiet life. It’s like I look at Kanye and he has it so right. He’s a fashion designer. And he has a talent for talking over music, which he said he’ll teach me. It’ll be called Krapping! Right? So good! I look at my life and think, what good is a perfume if you can’t buy it in every country in the world? I need something new.

Can I be honest Kdiary? I feel pretty resentful towards my family. If it wasn’t for my home video and my mum knowing Ryan Seacrest and people who have nothing better to do watching my life on television, none of them would be famous and we wouldn’t be about to do series 103 of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. That’s the hard, honest truth. Do you think Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami, or Khloe and Lamar or Kim and Kourtney Take New York or Watch Kim be Pregnant with her Family would have been at all successful without moi? (That’s French for me, BTW. Kanye is like totally expanding my brain).

I want my own show with just me and my everyday Krazy life! How fun would that be? The only trouble is that Kanye likes his privacy when he has nothing to sell. It’s so annoying. Hasn’t he ever heard the philosophical conundrum: does a tree still make a sound when it falls and no one is there to film it? Because honestly, that’s kind of how I feel when I don’t see a recording device. Like, maybe I don’t exist.

On that note, I better go because I’ve just texted Pap 43 to tell him that I’m off to the gym tomorrow at 6am. It’s totally tiring being photographed constantly and growing a human being at the same time.

Katch you tomorrow,

Kim xxx

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Here’s a scandal no one’s really talking about in the press or elsewhere for that matter. Republican members of Congress, as well as conservatives across the internet, are engaged in a group lie about the cost of Obamacare. Correction — it’s either a group lie or group stupidity or perhaps a mixture of both. I prefer to think that it’s a deliberate deception about the healthcare law because the alternative explanation is arguably more frightening: an array of prominent conservatives are simply too dumb to read a chart or grasp the basic difference between “gross” costs and “net” costs. It’s economics and finance 101, and considering how they fancy themselves the party of money — the free market party — the distinction between gross and net ought to be common knowledge.

On Tuesday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its quarterly report on the cost of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. The upshot is that the 10-year net cost of the program has risen by $40 billion from estimates in the February report. There are several reasons why, but I won’t bore you with the wonky details. Suffice to say, there’s nothing even remotely worrisome about the report or the status of Obamacare. Actually, the biggest news on this front is that the CBO has refused any further scoring for the Republican effort to repeal the law. Good for the CBO. It’s about damn time.

Meanwhile, however, Republicans across the board freaked out about the CBO report, claiming that the cost of Obamacare has doubled. I first heard this assessment from talking bumper sticker Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) who tweeted: “CBO: #Obamacare costs double to $1.8 trillion in first decade.” Other congressional Republicans tweeted the same thing, including Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz. Stockman and his fellow liars included a link to a Washington Examiner article by Senior Editorial Writer Philip Klein:

When President Obama was selling his health care legislation to Congress, he declared that “the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” But with the law’s major provisions set to kick in next year, a new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office projects that the law will cost double that, or $1.8 trillion.

Horseshit.

See what Klein and the Republicans did here? In the same way they routinely and strategically confuse the national debt with the federal budget deficit, these idiots are confusing the net cost of Obamacare, originally around $900 billion, with the gross cost of the program, which is now around $1.8 trillion. It’s the smaller net cost figure that’s important, not only because it was the $900 billion number that was most commonly quoted at the time of the bill’s passage, but also because the net cost takes into consideration savings and offsets from the program. For example, the gross cost of a primer-level economics book for Steve Stockman costs, say, $20 (large print, lots of illustrations), but after coupons and other discounts the net cost of the book is only $12. If you paid $12, it’d be a lie to go around saying the book cost $20, wouldn’t it? But if your goal is to criticize the book and make it seem like a waste of money, you’d clearly lie and quote the $20 price tag.

That’s exactly what they’re doing with Obamacare. Lying. A sitting member of Congress, along with the right-wing press and many other congressional Republicans, flagrantly lied about the cost of Obamacare. Because, well, that’s what they do now. See, Stockman doesn’t think it’s a human right to have affordable access to quality healthcare (unless you’re an embryo), but he thinks it’s a human right to buy a military style assault rifle from Walmart.

A cursory Google search revealed that the lie has spread like a pandemic throughout the wingnutosphere. Fox News, Human Events, Heritage Foundation, Hot Air — they all lied and wrote that the cost of Obamacare has “doubled.”

As for Mr. Klein at the Washington Examiner, he continued by writing:

Today, the CBO released new projections from 2013 extending through 2022, and the results are as critics expected: the ten-year cost of the law’s core provisions to expand health insurance coverage has now ballooned to $1.76 trillion.

Whoops. Wait. That wasn’t what Klein wrote yesterday — it’s what he wrote last year. Yes, this is the second year in a row that Klein lied about the gross cost versus the net cost of Obamacare.

He basically wrote the exact same post in March of 2012. In it, he had the balls to accuse the president of using “accounting tricks.” Hilarious if it wasn’t so infuriating. Days after his 2012 post went up, FactCheck.org ran an article debunking the widespread lie about the CBO’s estimate titled Health Care Costs Didn’t Double. FactCheck noted several purveyors of the lie:

–House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Tom Price of Georgia put out a press release saying that “[t]he new CBO projection estimates that the law will cost $1.76 trillion over 10 years – well above the $940 billion Democrats originally claimed.”

–A Fox News article repeated the Republican criticisms and said that the CBO had found the law would cost “twice as much as the original $900 billion price tag.”

–Another Fox version carried the headline, “ ‘Obamacare’ to Cost Twice as Much as Previously Estimated, According to New CBO Report.”

–And the conservative news outlet Newsmax ran a headline saying, “Obamacare’s Gross Costs Double to $1.76 Trillion, CBO Projects.” An Internet search turns up many conservative blog reports making a similar costs-have-doubled claim.

Indeed, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on. And now they’re doing it all over again.

Fox News and Newsmax, not to mention Stockman and the others, are bouncing off the walls right now insisting that “Obama lied” about Benghazi. And here they are for the second year in a row lying about the cost of Obamacare.

Last year, Kevin Drum wrote of the Obamacare lie, “Moral of this story: Never believe anything that Republicans say about Obamacare until you check out the source yourself. But you already knew that.” I’ll go one further: don’t believe them on anything. They don’t deserve the trust of the American people or the benefit of the doubt. The 2012 Romney campaign alone suffocated the last breath of veracity out of the Republican playbook. The only way they can survive is to continue to lie and hope that their voters are too moronic and uneducated to realize it.

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Among the minor media ventures I’ve dabbled in over the past couple of years to keep me from being evicted from my apartment have been a few stints on reality TV shows. No, I don’t fluff the ladies of Ru Paul’s Drag Race or sell my soul by greasing the idiocy of The Real Housewives of Wherever-the-Hell so that it can more easily slip into your home and poison the minds of your family. But, yes, I do have some experience putting together the relatively cheap programming that claims to be unscripted and otherwise “real” and I can therefore confirm your suspicions that this description isn’t entirely true. While most reality shows aren’t start-to-finish bullshit — although there are definitely a few that come close — many are the product of a lot of behind-the-scenes cunning by mischievous producers and clever editors who determine based on the material they have what they want the narrative to be and then massage the action to make it so. I’m not exactly giving away state secrets by divulging this, by the way; any astute viewer can pretty much figure out what’s completely for real and what’s been slightly adjusted.

Knowing this, though, and being acutely aware of some of the go-to tools in the reality TV bag of tricks, I tend to pick apart every reality show I watch, wondering what if anything was fudged and how it might have been done. That’s why, as I sat there last night watching the episode of Kitchen Nightmares that everyone’s having a blast talking about right now, I looked hard for something, anything that might let me know that what I was witnessing was fake. I actually wanted it to be phony. I didn’t want to believe that people like Amy and Samy Bouzaglo actually existed, except in the fevered mind of a reality show producer, who dreamt them up as pure 14-karat TV gold. Alas, apparently Amy and Samy are for real. Which means that the world is a shittier and stupider place than even I had imagined.

If you haven’t yet seen the show I’m referring to, do yourself a favor, drop everything you’re doing, and watch it immediately; it’s once-in-a-lifetime viewing. You all know how I feel about meme culture and what I think it’s doing to our sanity and intelligence as a nation, but social media hyper-connectivity was made for something like this. I’m terrified at the prospect of the Bouzaglos becoming celebrities — the objects of morning show fawning and maybe even the stars of a couple-you-love-to-hate show of their own — but for now the nationwide shaming these two idiots are being subjected to is the internet at its best.

If the 42 minutes of remorseless hostility, abuse of customers and employees, unethical business practices, and flat-out bug-eyed crazy on Kitchen Nightmares didn’t convince you that Amy Bouzaglo needs to be forcibly removed from society before she kills somebody and Samy Bouzaglo needs a serious lesson on the difference between a trophy wife and one that barely qualifies as an “honorable mention,” then their two-person crusade against the entire internet absolutely will. What began a couple of days ago with a damn-near-psychopathic, all-caps-locked lashing out against the “haters, bullies, and liars” who’d been bombarding them with bad Yelp reviews — and ridicule since the show aired — has degenerated into a full-on meltdown of biblical proportions. There’s been the invoking of God, threats to call the FBI, bullshit claims their restaurant’s Facebook page was hacked, and, now, even an online battle with Patton Oswalt. (Patton’s Twitter bio jokingly reads: “Mr. Oswalt is a former wedding deejay from Northern Virginia,” which Amy apparently fell for completely and attempted to mock accordingly when Patton got in on the feeding frenzy.)

Basically, while Gordon Ramsay may have walked off his own show for the first time in almost a hundred episodes, the saga of Amy’s Baking Company and its beaver-shit crazy proprietors was a dream come true for the producers of Kitchen Nightmares, the kind of reality TV fodder they go to sleep at night praying for. But what happened on TV was obviously just the beginning. What’s happened since provides a flawless example of how not to handle internet criticism and how fucked you are these days if, as a business owner, you happen to be a breathtakingly arrogant control freak who’s become far too used to keeping a tight leash on everyone around you. If you believe that you can run, say, a restaurant like a mental hospital, as Samy Bouzaglo and his Bride of Frankenuts mistakenly believe, regular customers — and potential joiners-in — now have the ability to bring you down a few dozen notches. And that’s putting it mildly.

What the Redditors, Yelpers, Farkers, 4Chaners, and general merry misanthropes of the internet are now doing is making life a living hell for Crazy Amy and Psycho Sam. If you haven’t been keeping up, because as usual it’s moving at a lightning-fast pace, in addition to the predictable vicious and comical “reviews” that have been piling up there, there have been pictures of various kinds of animal shit and cat remains posted to Amy’s Baking Company’s Yelp page (the latter because of one of the most, um, “revealing” comments made by Amy during the show, about her supposedly having “three little boys trapped inside cat bodies”). Meanwhile, for a time somebody had redirected the business’s web address to a White House petition to have Amy Bouzaglo committed, and the Reddit community went digging and uncovered what appears to be a felony credit card fraud conviction in Amy’s past. The couple says that because of the attention, which, let’s face it, they kind of brought on themselves, they’re now getting death threats. That obviously hasn’t stopped them from responding with even more of the vitriol and insanity that was on grand display during their Kitchen Nightmares appearance.

What any idiot knows in the era of social media is that you don’t feed the trolls and you absolutely don’t go out of your way to antagonize the Redditors. They will fucking eat you alive. And that’s exactly what they’re doing to Amy and Samy Bouzaglo. The internet denizens are an uncontrollable bunch; they’ll tear you to pieces even if you leave them alone, but they’ll absolutely eviscerate you if you go out of your way to bleed in the water.

It takes a special kind of delusional psychopath to think he or she can take on the internet and win. Of course, in case it’s not already glaringly obvious by now, Amy Bouzaglo and her husband are very special delusional psychopaths indeed. And yeah, it looks like they’re as real as reality TV gets.

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I wrote a piece yesterday arguing that Bill Maher’s lampooning of Wayne Brady for not being ‘black’ enough went too far. I tweeted the piece to Brady (who I started following) and noticed some awful comments on his feed that he had retweeted. This one stuck out from black militant Jennifer@JennyWOKE:

Brady replied to her saying something along the lines of “My daughter feels sorry for you”(although the tweet is no longer there), which then prompted the following response:

For some reason, I felt the need to respond to Jennifer and take her to task for her extraordinary ignorance and racism. I should have known  better. The argument descended into a slanging match with me calling her a stupid racist and her calling me a ‘fucking talking meatball’ and asking me to pass her ‘a bagel to nosh on’. (you can check the argument on my twitterfeed for the blow by blow).

I left the conversation recommending she read all of Malcolm X, rather than the first half which went down predictably well (“white people are so helpful. Where would we be without their guidance?” she tweeted back).

While my blood boiled and I wanted to carry on, it dawned on me that engaging with incomprehensibly stupid people on Twitter was not the best idea for the following reasons:

1. It’s on Twitter. You have 140 characters per message – hardly enough to articulate anything meaningful other than insults.

2. Some people really are stupid beyond belief. Anyone spouting racial purity ideology in America in 2013 clearly doesn’t have much brain power.

3. Jennifer@JennyWOKE has 33 followers (and that’s after being retweeted by Wayne Brady, who has 145,439 followers). She isn’t exactly a leading figure in the black community. I might as well have been tweeting to thin air.

4. It’s better to not give racist idiots a platform to air their views. Engaging with Jenny only meant she got to spout her offensive views to a wider audience. She’s had her one-tweet-of-fame moment, and that’s enough.

5. I had left my clothes in the washing machine all day and needed to get them out. Now they need washing again.

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Call me a hopeless dreamer, but there ought to be a rule in politics banning anyone who caused a crisis from later bitching about the crisis. For the last four years, we’ve witnessed the Republicans, who voted for every Bush-era spending bill and irresponsible tax cut, crapping their cages over the size of the resulting deficit and debt — again, a deficit and debt that they themselves created without uttering even a shrug of protest during eight years in which a surplus transformed into a record deficit. Not a word — except to condemn the Democratic president who was unfortunate enough to inherit the chaos.

Likewise, as we observe the mayhem surrounding the dueling “scandals” of Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press phone records subpoena, the Republicans, true to form, are tripping over each other in a mad dash to scream “Impeach!” into the next nearest cable news video camera. There’s only one problem: when it comes to the IRS situation and the AP phone debacle, the Republicans created the chain-reactions that led to these scandals.

Let’s begin with the IRS scandal first.

While it looks really, really bad for one of the most feared agencies within the Democratically-controlled executive branch to have been exclusively scrutinizing conservative groups, we only need to rewind to the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Citizens United decision to figure out why all of this is going on. The conservative Roberts court not only opened the floodgates allowing unlimited and unregulated corporate money to flow into campaigns, but it also blurred the line between independent 527 political groups and non-profit social welfare groups, which are classified with the designation 501(c)(4). These social welfare groups can also apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS, a designation that used to be the strict privilege of groups that didn’t engage in political speech. But since Citizens United, it’s much more challenging to determine which social welfare groups are dealing in predominantly political speech.

So the IRS is faced with the unenviable challenge of filtering out groups that are stepping over the line and flagrantly abusing the social welfare moniker.

Now, yes, I get it. The IRS staffers shouldn’t have used exclusively right-wing search terms to weed through the applications. They should’ve broadened the criteria to include terms across the political spectrum. But without the conservative, pro-Republican movie created by the infamous Citizens United group in 2008, not to mention the conservative, Republican-affiliated Supreme Court deciding in its favor, we might not be talking about this right now. Furthermore, the Republican-created deficit and the subsequent histrionic demand for austerity led to government cut-backs, including at the IRS where, within the Exempt Organizations Division, the staff has been significantly reduced, thus increasing workloads. Toss into the mix a considerable rise in tax exempt applications and there it is: a formula for negligence. Thanks, Republicans.

On to the AP scandal.

Right off the bat, it might surprise you to learn that it was a cabal of 31 Republican senators who demanded the investigation that eventually led to the subpoena of the AP’s phone records. So there’s that.

In a broader sense, however, I can’t help but to laugh whenever I hear a Republican scream about government overreach on national security and civil liberties. For eight years, the Republicans established an infrastructure under the banner of fighting evildoers at home and abroad — an infrastructure that included a wide variety of trespasses against civil liberties.

They seized phone records from reporters without subpoenas, they spied on liberal groups, they established the usage of body scanners and heightened security measures at airports, they loudly and in some cases tearfully demanded the ability to wiretap American citizens without warrants, they passed the USA PATRIOT Act and ultimately created the modern American surveillance state. The Bush era gave us this counter-terrorism Frankenstein, and now they’re suddenly alarmed about it.

But now that they’re not longer in charge, they melodramatically collapse onto their group fainting couch every time the Justice Department or the president ventures into the same territory — or, ironically enough, whenever the president doesn’t do enough along those lines. Whatever the Obama administration does, they’re against it. And so it is with the AP phone records situation. Once again, as with the IRS scandal, the cries for investigations and even impeachment are loud and plentiful.

For example, Bush’s former attorney general Michael Mukasey described the AP phone records situation by saying, “It’s reprehensible conduct.” This is the same attorney general who took over a Justice Department that had seized phone records from four journalists — without subpoenas — without even flinching. Mukasey was also directly involved with warrantless wiretapping of Americans citizens. And when it appeared as if Congress might pass legislation preventing this egregious activity from continuing, Mukasey literally burst into tears during a speech in which he demanded the power to continue the eavesdropping program or else there would surely be another 9/11. I’m not making that up.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that the post-9/11 fear-mongering and massively exaggerated counter-terrorism hysteria manufactured an atmosphere of capitulation and resignation to flagrant government overreach and violations of privacy and personal dignity.

And who’s to blame for the fear-mongering? People like Matt Drudge, of course, who aided in the effort to scare the crapola out of us about the so-called “terrorist threat” and yet ran a screamer headline on his front page in which he cleverly conflated the AP story with wiretapping: “GOVT TAPS PRESS PHONE RECORDS FOR MONTHS.”

But during the Bush years, Drudge, along with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel and the highest ranking Republican officials in Congress, demanded that all of Washington buy into the notion that you can’t have a Constitution if you’re dead. How do we know this? Well, because they actually said it. Over and over. A few examples for the record:

“You have no civil liberties if you are dead.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS)

“Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

“Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you’re sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.” Rush Limbaugh

Now, years later, these very same Republicans insist that “Big Sis” (Drudge’s nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano) and the “little black man-child” are forcing us to “grab the ankles” and submit to fascist authoritarian policies. Never mind that all of these policies were invented by Republicans and ballyhooed by Drudge in an atmosphere of manufactured fear during conservative control of, well, everything.

Throughout the duration of the Bush years, any and all opponents of these policies were shouted down as being with the terrorists — undermining American security and endangering the troops, while evildoers were lurking under our beds ready to spring forth and crash airplanes into everything. In those years, patriotism was defined by the speed and vigor by which we gave up our civil liberties in lieu of a lot of extra security. This mantra was defined, branded and codified by the Republican Party.

The post-9/11 maxim “either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists” wasn’t the concoction of Michael Moore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Janet Napolitano. It was entirely the purview of the Drudge-ruled authoritarian universe of fear and cowardice. And make no mistake: cowardice is precisely what it was — cry-baby cowardice masked by flag-waving machismo in support of a military-industrial-security complex that earned billions in profits on investments ranging from the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the production and deployment of body scanners. Rather than standing firm and upholding American values, the far-right embraced cowardice and set us on a course that’s become so deeply embedded into our political culture that it’s going to take many more years to unravel.

So as you observe the coming months and years of brain-melting scandal coverage surrounding these topics, blame a Republican. It’s okay. They deserve it.

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