Czechoslovakia still doesn't exist

[ProSense]

Czechoslovakia still doesn't exist

By Steve Benen

Easily my favorite quote from the Sunday shows was this gem from Liz Cheney, delivered on ABC's "This Week."

&quot W)e've now had three-and-a-half years of Obama policy, and it looks an awful lot like, whether you're talking about the Mexico City speech in 2009, the Cairo speech in 2009, the extent to which he's been apologizing for America (1), he's abandoned some of our key allies, like Israel (2), Poland (3), Czechoslovakia (4), he's attempted to appease our enemies, the Iranians (5), for example, the Russians (6). He's now getting ready, as we watch these scenes unfold on the air, to slash our defense (7). And the defense sequestration includes over $120 billion for embassy security (8). And so the president himself's got a terrible record on national security (9)."

I annotated the paragraph because, well, there's just so many amazing tidbits in it. Let's take them one at a time, shall we?

(1) The president never apologized for America.

(2) Israel doesn't feel abandoned by the U.S.

(3) Poland doesn't feel abandoned by the U.S.

(4) Czechoslovakia doesn't exist. (In April, the Romney campaign forgot this pesky detail, too).

(5) Harsh sanctions are the opposite of appeasement.

(6) There's been no appeasement with Russia.

(7) The modest defense cuts proposed by the White House have been endorsed by the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs. It's Republicans who've proposed slashing defense.

(8) Actually, it's the Republican sequester plan that would cut funding at embassies.

(9) After killing bin Laden, decimating al Qaeda, and preventing terrorist attacks, it seems a little silly to characterize President Obama's record on national security as "terrible."

- more -

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/17/13913571-czechoslovakia-still-doesnt-exist

Best shredding of stupidity ever!

[BumRushDaShow]

1. Rachael has been busy this election season

[pinboy3niner]

2. I think you may need this...

"Czechoslovakia still doesn't exist."

[Jennicut]

3. Russia is our direct enemy? And I thought the Czechoslovakia quote was bad.

Liz Cheney just isn't all that bright but she is after all, a Cheney.

[Roy Rolling]

4. or as Chris Matthews pronounces it...

CHEENEY.

[CanonRay]

5. It's like they quit following the news the day Reagan left office

The Soviets are still a threat...

It's always 1988 in their heads.

[ProSense]

6. You could be right.

They've been spreading propaganda ever since instead of focusing on reality.

[JHB]

12. I think it's 1979 that they're perpetually stuck in...

They have a meme that liberals are stuck in 1968 (the bomb of a movie An American Carol had a whole musical number devoted to it), but they're the ones stuck: in 1979. Ayatollahs and Evil Empires everywhere, taxes need cutting, government needs deregulating, fear "you know who" for street crime (and just waiting to start looting if law& order slacks off), etc.

And they all want Ronald Reagan to step in and make everything wonderful. Again. In their heads.

[rurallib]

7. the problem is that Cheney got her message out on network TV

no doubt heard by millions.
I didn't see the segment (for that matter I never see any of those shows) but if she got her points in without IMMEDIATE ON-AIR rebuttal, her points stand as 'the truth.'
When Benen gets the real story out in his blog it is probably viewed by a few thousand.
Ownership of the media, failure of real journalism especially on the networks works so greatly in the favor of the Repubs.

Perception is reality.

[ProSense]

8. Yeah, the people

who have no idea that the country no longer exists will be swayed.

Seriously, people aren't as stupid as Republicans take them for. Otherwise, Romney would have a comfortable lead in the polls.

Also, it's the Maddow Blog, which gets a lot of traffic and the topics are usually covered on Rachel's show.

Oh, and don't underestimate how these are spread via Twitter and Facebook.

[zeemike]

11. You nailed it Rurallib

They have read the three most important books in their life...The Prince, 1984, and Atlas Shrugged, and formulated their plan to win from that.
Facts don't matter as long as they have the platform to tell the big lie and no one calls them on it.

[lastlib]

14. You left off Mein Kampf

It sits right next to the Bible on the nightstand.

[zeemike]

20. No I think they keep that under the mattress.

It is there secret pleasure that they masturbate to when no one is looking.

[Major Hogwash]

18. Joe Scarbrow said that the media is biased for the liberals.

And then he said -- Despite this fact, Reagan was elected in 1980, re-elected in 1984, then Bush was elected in 1988, and George W Bush was elected in 2000, and re-elected in 2004, so Romney should quit whining that the liberal media isn't giving him a fair shake.

Joe is a Republican, yet his brand of GOP talking points bullshit is spewed on MSNBC almost every weekday morning -- so how is it that Joe claims the media is biased for liberals?

Most of the American public is not dumb enough to just swallow everything Joe says just because he is the one that said it.
Because most of what he says is hypocritical propaganda, newspeak straight out of the novel "1984".
And Joe has very little credibility with anyone paying attention to politics now anyway.

I'm sure that some people watched Liz and thought, "yeah she is right."
But, those aren't the majority of voters in this country.
There are fewer and fewer people relying on what someone like Liz says about the Democrats anymore.
Liz is just one of the members of a dying political party, and that is because of their knee-jerk tendency to lie about everything.

The debates in October will sway more people towards voting for President Obama than anyone as insignificant as Liz Cheney, anyway.

[genxlib]

9. What did she mean to say?

Aside from the obvious gaffe of a non-existent country, I am still trying to figure out what she meant anyways.

What does she think that Obama has done to any of the Countries that were once part of the Czechoslovakia? Or to any Country in the region? Or to any COuntry that can even be confused with it (Chechnya maybe)?

I have tried to parse this statement 100 ways and it makes even less sense.

In the end, I am starting to think this woman is even worse than her Father. Ideology without knowledge or experience can be even more dangerous than the twisted ideology of her Father.

Beyond that, I am still trying to figure out why the media treats her as a credible pundit for anything.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

10. The Soviets! The USSR! They all live in Republicans' minds

ever hopeful of taking out the USSR and spewing out misinformation to the masses.

[vlyons]

13. She also labelled Iranians as "enemies"

The Iranian people are not my enemies. Is she ignorant of the fact in 1953, the CIA funded and supported the overthrow of a democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and installation of the repressive dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi? See http://www.iranchamber.com/history/coup53/coup53p1.php.

Well I remember Iranian friends in my college days, who lived in fear of Iranian spies and torture of their families back in Iran. Personally, I think the USA has a lot to apologize for.

[caseymoz]

17. I think Iranians got their revenge.

We gave them the Shah. They gave us Reagan, who wouldn't have won without the Iran Hostage Crisis. By extension, they also gave us the Bush presidencies, the last of which was nearly fatal. More than that, the conservatism that ascended due to what Iranians did weighed down our political system with years of backward conservatism, that's going to take us decades to recover from if it's even possible.

There was never any connection between what the CIA did in Iran (and a lot of other countries) and what US people vote on in elections. Truth is, in 1953, the CIA was a renegade agency. Paranoid, accountable to no one for its covert activities, unsupervised, and flush with cash it raked off freely from the Marshall Plan; at a time when the dollar was the supreme currency in the world.

For people of my generation, the first they ever heard of Iran was the revolution and the taking of the American Embassy. The hatred Iranians showed on television then, and the lawlessness of taking the American Embassy and holding hostages created a bad emotional state among the US people. Being confronted by that level of hatred wasn't conducive to understanding of cause, and that's the kind of trauma that lasts a long time.

Meanwhile, Iranians have punished themselves with the Islamic Republic, far more than what the Shah did. It seems to me those clerics exploited anger over the coup for their own political ends.

I'm not saying they don't have a legitimate grievance, but sooner or later, you have to put a stop to the anger and suspicion, which is traumatic in itself, and get rational about how to come to some understanding.

What the CIA managed to do there can't be done today.

I'm not saying Iranians don't legitimate grievance,

[vlyons]

21. re: What the CIA managed to do there can't be done today

Oh yeah? What do you think is going on in Afghanistan? You gotta know that the CIA was running operatives out of the Benghazi consulate.

If you had Iranian friends BEFORE the Iranian revolution, you would have gotten an earfull about the Shah's tyrannical regime, and the war with Iraq, in which both sides sent 12 yr old boys to the front.

[caseymoz]

23. I didn't say the US improved morally.

The action in Afghanistan is foremost, quite overt, not covert. Which is the way we would have to do it now.

My point, which you've misconstrued, is that we can't pull the same sneaky business we did in 1953. The dollar is no longer strong, meaning we can't bribe people wholesale, and we're no longer the only power standing undamaged by World War II. Plus, we've declined because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I didn't mean the US wouldn't monkey in Iranian affairs, I meant it's not able to with the same effectiveness as in 1953.

And whatever role the US had in inciting Iraq, the Iranians should have thought of how awful the consequences could be for invading the US first. By old international law, an embassy is considered sovereign territory of the "guest" country. Invasion of an embassy is invading the country. I'll admit they only took several hundred hostages, and released them, but that's probably because that was all the damage they were able to do.

In 1979 when the embassy was taken, the biggest demographic in the US wasn't even born by 1953, so they couldn't have been responsible. Therefore, the first time Iranians catch that generation's attention is by foaming the mouth in rage, crying "Death to America" calling all Americans the Great Satan, and by committing a major breech of US sovereignty by international agreements that are far older than 1953.

There were better ways for Iran to overthrow the Shah that didn't involve any of that.

I'm not saying revenge is anything good, nor that the US should have done it, but it's still not smart to hit the 800 pound gorilla in the balls for stepping on your toe. Iran took about 440 hostages. As a result, they lost maybe, a half-million of their men killed?

Who won there? Moreover, they were almost as stupid and belligerent about handling Saddam Hussein before the war as they were about handling the US. Hussein actually praised the Islamic Revolution, and Iran rebuffed him. I could understand mad, but mad-stupid is without excuse.

And then Iran assured the most militant, irrational, anti-Iranian, hard-liners took control here, and those Cold Warriors aggravated the war every way they could.

No, I'm sorry. I'm very skeptical that the Islamic Republic is better than the Shah, and that it ever was. The Iranians had a lot of hope in it though. I'll admit, different people got persecuted under the IR than the Shah, but on the balance, I think the IR did worse. That's not meant to say that the Shah was good and he should have stayed in power. IMHO, he was better than what they got, something that happens in many revolutions.

Question: how was the US instrumental in sending 12-year-old boys to the front? I don't think the US made that decision.

I would have walked away from your screamin' Iranians in 1979 and would have said, "I didn't do a damn thing to you. I will vote for the first time in the 1980 election. Get the fuck out of my face." Fact is, if they had run down their grievances before they became enraged, I would have supported them.

And most young adults in the US felt the same way I did, and I'd say most of them voted for Reagan as a result. People like me had our whole lives ahead of us. We could have changed Middle East policy in the long run. Unfortunately, after the Embassy was taken, the perception by that generation was that people in the Middle East were lawless, hysterical, and hated us.

It doesn't matter how we discuss this. The Iran-US Cold Conflict will not be resolved until the generation that came of age in the 1970s has passed away, in both countries. That's the only way it will happen, as long as there's not another blow-up. Then it will take longer.

[caseymoz]

15. I thought Johnson abandoned Czechoslovakia.

I expect Romney to win in a landslide against Lyndon Johnson in November.

[PatrynXX]

16. God forbid

if some nut thinks Yugoslavia is still around. Yes our rocker has that name on the bottom. But maybe thats why Willard (didn't know only 5-6 % of Republicans don't know thats his first name. Most think it's Mitt or Mitchell.) thinks the USSR is still a problem X_X

[WinkyDink]

19. 9/11/01. Top that one, Lizzie.

[Marr]

22. There certainly are a lot of idiot children of politicians in our political establishment nowadays.

Legacies are so often cretins, because they didn't have to earn their spot. Nepotism has a very bad effect in the long run.