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Michael Savage blows it again, shows his intellectual laziness
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"Saturday Night Fever" meets Joe the Bookie.
Read more about Michael Savage and his lies:
Really, Savage, you have to stop making this so damn easy.
Tonight on his syndicated radio program, our favorite professional blowhard declared in his most stentorian voice that President Barack Obama had violated the U.S. Constitution.
How, you ask? Well, Savage contended, by announcing that the US and Russia would strike a "follow-on" agreement to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) that is due to expire near the end of this year.
Quoting from the Constitution, Savage believed he was making his point by noting that the president enters into treaties with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate.
Obama, Savage said, is a constitutional lawyer and therefore knows how to get around the constitution's strictures. By entering into this "follow-on" agreement, the brilliant Savage (just ask him, he'll tell you he is) reasoned that Obama is bypassing any vote by the Senate.
A dictatorship in the making, Savage declared. Obama is surrendering our "advantage" in nuclear weapons, he snorted.
Except that he is wrong on both counts.
First, the nuclear weapon "advantage" claim: according to the Federation of American Scientists, the US has 9,400 nuclear weapons now, as opposed to Russia's 13,000. By 2016, when this follow-on treaty would go into effect, the US will have 7,275 nukes to Russia's 7,175.
So what are we surrendering?
Savage also didn't mention that this treaty would only apply to deployed weapons, which is advantageous to the US.
I don't know where Savage got this idea about Obama trying to "sneak" the follow-on agreement past the Senate. Maybe he was talking to the idiot lawyer that filed those incoherent papers in Savage's ill-fated suit (are there any others that this litigation-happy fool files?) against the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Here's the real deal: Any treaty, regardless of what it's called, has to be voted upon by the Senate. Had Savage done five minutes of research, he would have known that.
But as I've pointed out many times in my book on Savage and his lies, Savage is not one to let the truth get in the way of his argument.
But don't take my word for it. Here's some verbiage on the follow-on agreement by a person who studies these things for a living, Kingston Reif, Deputy Director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation:
While these divisions are unlikely to derail ratification of a START follow-on treaty, more than 67 votes will be necessary to build momentum for more controversial treaties to follow (e.g., the CTBT) that also will need 67 Senate votes. If the START follow-on treaty can only muster 67 votes, we can probably forget about the CTBT.
(I don't know what CTBT is an acronym for, and it really doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion.)
So you see, the follow-on treaty will absolutely need to be ratified by the Senate, and by Russia as well.
So Savage's batshit-crazy theory of an Obama "dictatorship" is another product of an intellectually incurious mind trying desperately to come up with "facts" to suit his agenda.
Seriously, somebody needs to email me a copy of his Ph.D. "dissertation." I'd love to truth-check it and see how much of it is actually his.
Apparently seeking to further distinguish himself as the world's laziest Ph.D., Savage also declared this evening that Obama's approval numbers are in the negative. To back up his claim, Savage quoted the "Daily Presidential Tracking Poll" published by Neptune, NJ-based Rasmussen Report.
Rasmussen, a darling of the far-right's talking heads, calculates his index by subtracting a three-day "rolling average" of respondents who said they "strongly disapprove" of the job Obama is doing from those who say they "strongly approve."
In today's poll, Obama comes out with a -5 rating, meaning there were 5 percent more people who answered in the negative.
So Savage took that and ran with it. Problem is, as usual, Savage didn't look any deeper than he needed to suit his biased agenda.
See, Rasmussen makes a big deal of saying he polls likely voters, as opposed to those other polls that aren't so picky. But he only polls 500 people! There were more than 125 million votes cast in the last presidential election. 500 of more than 125 million. That's an infinitesimal grouping, no matter how you "weight" the results.
And the second problem: The index only counts "strongly" for and against. If Savage had read a few paragraphs further, he would have seen that Rasmussen found that overall, 52 percent of respondents approved of Obama's job.
Hardly tanking, if you ask me.
Honestly Savage, do you mean to be this stupid?
Keep the faith.
