Tag Archives: Douchbaggery

Donald Trump is a Terrible Person

Donald TrumpAs being reported everywhere (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, USA Today,  TheDaily News, The New York Times, CNN, The Boston Globe and about a million others) Donald Trump is now officially running for president, rounding out the Republican field at an even dozen. This was pretty damn sad.

Almost as quickly, many sources let us know just how full of shit he was. This was even sadder:

If asked our opinion, we’d say that Trump isn’t really serious in his bid and that it’s simply a ploy to collect as much of the Republican’s crazy fringe as he can to eventually sell them off to the highest bidder with an endorsement. Serious or not, this move does make Trump, officially, a politician which allows us to cast judgement.

The Verdict

Trump is a politician that drenches us in Dumbassery, Douchebaggery and Dickory in torrential amounts. He has no positive traits whatsoever. He is convicted of the “Triple D”: Dumbassery, Douchebaggery and Dickory all in the Worst Degree. He is a terrible human being and is so sentenced to please, in the name of all goodness and light in the world, just go away.

Who Built What Now?

Even discounting the audience chanting the phrase “we built it” has become the mantra of the Republican Convention in Tampa, Florida.  The phrase is adapted from a quote made by president Obama in July.

When quoted by conservative sources the quote is relayed as: “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.”  This has been used repeatedly and vitriolically to demonstrate that the president has no respect for small business owners.  However the complete quote, in context, is:

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

More importantly the president has continuously clarified that the “built that” portion of the speech was referring to “roads and bridges”, or infrastructure.  Concerning the ads (which often edit the speech to highlight the statement further)  leveraging the statement “They’re flat-out wrong.  Of course Americans build their own businesses.”

The Verdict

The usual political hypocrisy of ignoring an opponent’s explanation while enjoying a long history of lambasting them for doing the same is here in spades.  However making such a clearly forced and deceptive interpretation the centerpiece of the entire convention is a unprecendented case of Mass Douchebaggery.  In addition we’d like to bestow all the leaders of the Republican convention involved in this decision a shiny new asshat.

Sad, Paid Tweets for Romney

In “Report says 15 percent of Mitt Romney Twitter followers are paid fakes” Ars Technica summarizes a new report that estimates that more than 15% of Mitt Romney’s Twitter followers have been generated by paid services.  The report from Barracuda Labs points specifically to July 21st when Romney’s fan base jumped by 116,922 new followers.

These new followers represented a single-day 17% spike in followers for Romney.  Fully 25% of the accounts were less than four days old and over 23% had never issued a tweet.  Interestingly over 10% of the accounts were later suspended without comment by Twitter.

The study explored the shady grey market of purchasing followers by opening test accounts and purchasing followers for them for an average of $18 per 1000 follows.  They then collected metrics about the fake accounts and applied them to Twitter accounts at large.  The practice of selling accounts is against Twitter’s terms of service but the firm seems to do little about it.

Verdict

We must be clear that the Romney campaign has yet to comment and the report’s evidence can only reasonably considered circumstantial.  However the evidence is also very convincing.  Having taken into account the minimal potential impact we still feel that this kind of store-bought deception earns the Romney campaign a charge of Douchebaggery in the Third Degree.  In addition we also give the campaign an additional charge of Misdemeanor Dumbassery just for the plain egotistic silliness spending any money at all on fake Twitter followers.

We are willing to suspend these charges should it come to light that the campaign did not, indeed, purchase the followers in question.

Classic Sadness: Bill Clinton Defines “Is”

Bill Clinton found himself in trouble in 1998.  The Lewinsky Scandal would haunt him from that point on and will most likely remain the defining point of his presidency.  While the entire affair (pun noted) was full to overflowing with sadness Clinton’s use of semantics earns him a special place in our sad political history.

After adamantly telling Jim Lehrer shortly after the story broke that “There is no improper relationship” we all know that it turned out that indeed there actually had been an improper relationship.  Clinton defended himself very sadly indeed:

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement….Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”

Basically Clinton finds his answer justified as he and Miss Lewinsky had no improper relationship that day.  Of course had Lehrer not been such a sloppy reporter and asked all questions in past/present/future tenses Clinton’s high moral standards would have forced him to admit that there was a relationship.

In the resulting deposition Clinton was asked “Have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, as that term is defined in Deposition Exhibit 1.”  That definition clearly wasn’t ironclad as Clinton honestly answered “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.”

Apparently the definition, as interpreted by Clinton, included only giving oral sex – not receiving.  In addition he claimed never to had contacted Lewinsky’s “genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks” by saying:

“I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies.”

Put simply while Lewinsky’s breast may have touched Clinton, he did not touch her breast.

Verdict

We do feel some sympathy for Clinton: if there’s one thing the testimony offered proved is that this was perhaps the most depressing example of oral sex ever undertaken.  However that sympathy can not extend to our verdict.

While these amazingly pedantic explanations did prevent Clinton from being impeached we are still forced to charge him with Felony Douchbaggery for what continues to be the textbook definition of the term.

Tragedy Breeds Dickory

In the first of what we fear will be many posts regarding the tragic shootings in Colorado (as reported by MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and all other major news outlets) we would like to introduce you to Louie Gohmert, a sad, angry little congressman from Texas.

As reported on Huffinton Post and also in The Maddow Blog, Louie feels that he knows why this tragedy occurred:

“You know what really gets me, as a Christian, is to see the ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and then some senseless crazy act of a derelict takes place.” … “Some of us happen to believe that when our founders talked about guarding our virtue and freedom, that that was important,” he said. “Whether it’s John Adams saying our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people … Ben Franklin, only a virtuous people are capable of freedom, as nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters. We have been at war with the very pillars, the very foundation of this country.”

(While he is correct that Adams was quite pro-religion Franklin most assuredly was not.  However both men were major, outspoken proponents of the separation of church and state; a fact that clearly eludes representative Gohmert.)

In a rambling conclusion Gohmert intimates that the recent challenges to the Separation of Church and State may be preventing God from intervening in situation like this:

“People say … where was God in all of this?  We’ve threatened high school graduation participations, if they use God’s name, they’re going to be jailed … I mean that kind of stuff. Where was God? What have we done with God? We don’t want him around. I kind of like his protective hand being present.”

While a defense can (and most likely will) be made that the congressmen never actually related today’s events to his beliefs it’s very difficult for reasonable people not to take that message away from his comments.

Verdict

Yes, blowhards will be blowhards, but to Gohmert decided to use this tragedy for his political gain before the bodies even had a chance to cool – in fact less than 9 hours from the murders.  For that he easily earns a sentence of Federal Felony Dickory in the First Degree.

His comments relating the founding fathers are true, but misleading and self-serving, which adds an additional charge of Douchbaggery in the Third Degree.

Classic Sadness: The 2003 “Mission Accomplished” Speech

Photo by Wikipedia

On May 1st, 2003 – less than six weeks after the start of a conflict many would argue is still ongoing – President Bush announced “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”  An enormous banner reading, “Mission Accomplished,” ruffled in the breeze behind him.

Of course we now know that although “Major Combat Operations” stopped the conflict continues to this day and has claimed (by varying accounts) the lives of over 4,500 U.S. servicemen and  women and tens-of-thousands of Iraqi (some estimates are in the hundreds of thousands) after this announcement.

It may be argued that the case depends completely on the definition of “Major Combat Operations” but semantics aside the hubris and spectacle of the day would haunt the administration.  Bush would later say in 2009, “Clearly, putting ‘Mission Accomplished’ on an aircraft carrier was a mistake.”

Verdict

The administration’s later admissions concerning the inappropriateness of the banner coupled with the legitimate points about the definition of what was being announced soften the blow here.  While history may very well treat the former president more harshly we can only sentence him to Misdemeanor Douchebaggery for hiding behind technical definitions and ignoring the broader implications.  We also add the charge of Dumbassery in the Fifth Degree simply for being unable to see how easily this could bite him in the ass.

Obama Campaign Claims about Romney’s Outsourcing are Sad

Several televisions spots produced by the Obama campaign focus on his record as an outsourcer of jobs while he managed Bain Capital.  As both the Washington Post Fact Checker and FactCheck.org review in-depth there is no reasonable evidence to support this claim.

Here’s one of the ads in question:

As an aside: while the focus of this has been on his time at Bain the ad also claims that he outsourced jobs as governor of Massachusetts.  This is also more complex that presented and is covered well in the FactCheck.org piece.

Verdict

The Obama campaign is leaning heavily on official (but unconvincing) SEC filings to support their claims.  Even if correct they provide only the most tenuous of connections leading us to consider an initial finding of Felony Douchebaggery.

However, in response to criticism, they are scrambling to provide any compelling proof for the claims but are still running the ads without that proof making this a clear case of Dickory in the First Degree.