Imagine this - John Derbyshire approves of something inane.
What the writer of that letter seems to fail to recognize is that Moore is only successful precisely because he taps into an attitude on the parts of many Americans that the government isn't doing enough. In fact, if Moore didn't ask for the government to do things, the man would have no career at all, and would in fact have no example whatsoever to follow.
Liberalism isn't incompatible with capitalism, and there are in fact numerous successful liberal capitalists who fight for a stronger and more responsive government with no contradiction whatsoever. Now, the question is: if all of these liberal capitalists (many of whom made money predominantly because of their liberalism) try to run those same businesses without referencing or using their liberalism...aren't they losing exactly what makes them models to be followed?
Moore succeeds in that vaunted yet fluid "marketplace of ideas" because of his ideas. If you tell people to follow Moore's example while ignoring everything that motivated him to do what he did, you're stripping out a huge part of the capitalist motivation.
I do get the feeling, however, that the entire point was to ensnare Moore in a snide catch-22, and I will give the writer credit for that. He was very, very snide.
Is it possible to break grasping conservatives of the delusion that we are in World War II all over again in Iraq?
My position: Yes, but only if we give them an even more desperately wrong narrative to cling to. For instance, this is the War of the Worlds...but real!
A word to the not-so-wise: in your column condeming Al Gore's supposed mental instability, please don't say that his charges against George Bush are superceded by all the fake scandals Bill Clinton wasn;t involved in.
Perhaps worst of all, he stood by a president and was part of an administration that for years ignored and covered up attacks by the very enemies we face today so they would not have to take responsibility for defending America's vital interests and its civilian population.
President Clinton and Vice President Gore betrayed their oath of office to the Constitution and to defend the United States most blatantly when they blamed these attacks on "accidents," on talk-show hosts, on "right-wing Christian militiamen," on any convenient scapegoat but the real enemy of Islamo-fascism that has been at war with the U.S. since at least 1979.
It's amazing how eight years of repeating the same dumbass charges about Clinton has led to the point where Joseph Farah can spout the craziest unproven charges about the man and think that he's actually taking the intellectual and factual high ground.
Although the part where Clinton was ignoring al-Qaeda because a right-wing Christian militiaman committed a terrorist attack has to be one of my favorite denunciations of Clinton's policies of all time. "He accurately portrayed what was happening, which caused September 11th! He should have known even then to blame it on Iraq."
Remember about a week ago, Howard Kurtz was talking about how the media coverage of same-sex weddings, and how it was too "upbeat"? Well, Tim Graham has decided to defend Howard Kurtz, and it really, really doesn't work out for him.
This should be good...
This is a stream of nonsense, pretty much, but even though Graham makes a blind assertion with no evidence, there would be a reason that many conservative achievements wouldn't be hailed as a "landmark" or "milestone" - most of the achievements are themselves either halting progress or rolling it back. Of course, this is moot, since Graham provides no context for this statement whatsoever, but hey.
How do you make coverage balanced? Tilt it irrevocably to the right!
So, besides the utterly idiotic conflation of things that have nothing to do with same-sex marriage, Tim Graham doesn't know how quotes work. "So-called partial birth abortion" would either be redundant, or it would be a conservative news source putting square quotes around something that someone in a balanced forum would be saying. If you put quotes around so-called partial birth abortion, you're indicating that you're quoting someone else's reference to it as that.
So - Tim Graham can't write, doesn't know anything about media coverage, and his idea of balance is reporting that he's right and liberals are wrong. Keep in mind that he's a media watchdog.
Neal Boortz: not an elitist, but thinks half of America is too stupid to live in the country.
As far as I'm concerned, he and the intellectual elite (those who understand that a republican democracy isn't really a democracy and can recycle stale stand-up jokes from VH1's Night at the Improv) are more than welcome to stake out their claim to the world in a little faux-libertarian enclave in some spacious Western state where they can take over building their own roads and get rid of the minimum wage, and see how long it takes before guns 'n' grit runs smack dab into reality.
What I find most interesting, though, is that his definition of "stupid" seems to include rather classist stereotypes whose real numbers most definitely include conservatives/libertarians.
Now, not only am I sure that there are more than a few people who would reside in Boortz's America that watch Entertainment Tonight...his claim is bogus. Entertainment tonight is, by anyone's reckoning, the most-watched entertainment news source, not the most watched news source. (This search also turned up this idiocy - scroll down to the "Left Wing Media Bias part Deux" entry - wherein they confuse Fox for Fox News and declare that the "fair and balanced" network is opent about being conservative.)
Boortz tries to point out that we can ferret out the welfare-state lovers (those who don't deserve democracy) by just rounding up the Entertainment Tonight-watchers, and ship them off to whatever misbegotten country will satisfy their anti-capitalist needs, and then they can just arrest all the doctors (docs?) they want.
You heard it here first - Mary Hart and John Tesh were simply the first injection of socialist tyranny into our grand democratic venture. Well, not democratic, according to Boortz, but you catch the drift. Since the Christian fundies get South Carolina, I really do think we should get the entire West Coast.
The confusion at having people talk poorly about the president on the parts of many conservatives makes little, if any, sense. People don't like the President? Blasphemy! And the idea that crazy conspiracy theories somehow only popped up when Bush became president is something I'll challenge just as soon as I get through reading the saga of Bill Clinton, Drug Runner.
But Larry Elder decides that Liberals Killed Civility...and he even has the out-of-context quotes to prove that liberals are truly the worst!
It's pretty much inarguable at this point that we went forth with information that was inaccurate and/or misleading, but there's still a debate over whether or not that constitutes a "lie". Many of us already have our minds made up, but I will grant that the common ground rests on the fact that Bush wasn't quite seeking the facts as much as he was seeking this war.
By the way, Dan Burton just went to the produce stand. Word has it he's going to try to prove Bill Clinton was the one torturing the soldiers at Abu Ghraib - after all, he already proved Clinton killed Vince Foster.
"Bush is an incompetent leader," said Pelosi. "In fact, he's not a leader. He's a person who has no judgment, no experience and no knowledge of the subjects that he has to decide upon."
Oh, my FUCKING ABSTRACT DEITY! Not INCOMPETENT! Even South Park won't say the I-word...
So, someone believes the President is really bad at their job. I'm sorry, but on the outrage meter, that shouldn't even register a 1 on a scale of 100. Mainly because Tom Delay declared that her remarks "put American lives at risk". Criticize the president, you kill the troops. Yep, Pelosi really deserved that.
He was in Missouri this week claiming that Sen. Kerry was not up to the job of protecting this nation. What nerve. Where was Dick Cheney when that war was going on?"
Yes, and, of course, nobody ever maligned Clinton's lack of service. Nobody ever said a draft-dodger was unfit to be president. Ever.
But then, we get to the juicy stuff.
I wasn't aware there was an iron curtain relating to talking about religion or politics at work, considering I've done so at every job I've ever been at, and Republicans generally started it. (Keep in mind that the rest of Elder's column is based on anecdotes, which makes mine just as relevant as his.)
It's starting to sound to me like Elder's problem is that he knows people who don't like George Bush. Other than the monkey crack, it sounds like in general conversation about politics and world events (yes, some people consider those proper topics to converse about, strange as it may seem), people reveal that they don't like George Bush. I've never known there was a social rule that said it's impolite to have a political opinion, but I do know one that says it's okay to get hypocritically pissed off when someone brings up a political stance that you don't agree with.
And to be honest, I'd be more affronted by someone bringing up in conversation that George Bush is a great president than that George Bush is a horrible president, but it has more to do with my own internal biases than any social decorum. Particularly in a situation where I'm actually having a conversation with someone.
Oh my God...not a a question directly relevant to your job in a conversation about your job!
Okay, that's just goofy, but damn. Sam's experience is now indicative of our entire national discourse? Powerful kid.
I'm just going to link to this, and declare that it trumps anything Elder will come up with.
The problem that I have with this incessant stream of pointless anecdotes isn't even necessarily that Elder's offended. It's that he's acting as if something novel is happening. People have had strong partisan feelings about presidents and other leaders since we started electing the poor bastards.
It appears as if Bush-hater-haters are more than willing to lump anyone who doesn't like George Bush in with the anecdotal evidence Elder has been able to muster, equating dislike of George Bush with the undesirable and sometimes extreme people that Elder and his merry band run into. Does that seem quite fair to anyone else?
TBogg talks about the reaction to Gore's speech alone, which was, in many cases, just as over-the-top as the criticism of Bush Elder anecdotally relates. (And isn't the last statement factually true?)
But let's look at some reaction to one of the statements Elder cited from Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg. Particularly at conservative web forum Free Republic.
[...]
Give Lautenberg a break. Walking around with a constant load in your Depends would make me cranky too.
[...]
Lautenberg is a Nazi. He's a gun grabber who wanted to sue gun manufacturers out of business. As such, he hates freedom, hates the constitution, and hates America.
[...]
Do Democrats, led by Frank "The Big Pile of ****" Lautenberg, want to get into a name-calling contest?
Secret Bush haters? Back to Larry, whom you shouldn't ask about his job, lest you be declared socially unfit:
Apparently, Larry Elder has a problem with quotes: namely, coming up with ones that demonstrate the point he's trying to make. Kael's quote shows some severe ideological sheltering, but the mentality he's discussing actually isn't demonstrated by the quote. She doesn't pass judgment on people who voted for Nixon, she doesn't say she hates the president (she very well may have, but this quote doesn't demonstrate that).
Actually, many mature people I know get into disputes over politics in social settings. They're mature enough to understand that you can talk about politics without destroying relationships, and do so intelligently. I guess Elder will do anything for a bromide.
Yep. Too bad one has nothing to do with the other.
Write me. I'm collecting stories.
What about you? Have you bitten your tongue while somebody you just met demeaned former president Clinton, Al Gore, or other Democrats by calling them traitorous, unpatriotic, anti-American or reminiscent of Stalin/Hitler? How many times have you fought back the urge to defend a Democrat against unfair, hysterical, emotional, nonsensical and childish "Democrats hate America" type remarks?
Write Larry. He's collecting stories.
The soldiers are, apparently, very sensitive people. Nancy Pelosi was chastized by House Majority Leader Tom Delay for saying that Bush had an incompetent Iraq policy; the troops were going to suffer for that. Those who criticize Bush at all are giving a blank check to our enemies to assault the troops - in fact, they're encouraging them to do so.
Repeat that for an hour. You'll get a sense of what it's like to listen to Rush Limbaugh's show on American Forces Radio (truncated, since airtime is at a premium). But why does such a fierce partisan get to be on AFR, and why is his counterbalance NPR? Eric Boehlert explores this.
The things that stand out the most from the article are the insistence that NPR is equivalent to Rush Limbaugh, that Limbaugh is on because he's popular rather than being conservative (but Howard Stern can't be on because he's too vulgar), and that everything I said before is utter bullshit because the only reason Rush is on the air is that a bunch of House Republicans whined his way on the network, claiming "censorship".
The big issue here is that for all the talk of criticism of Bush being equivalent to giving a terrorist a gun yourself, that talk is what's going to our troops overseas. For an hour a day, all they hear is that a Democrat or liberal is their domestic enemy, and that they're under attack from them constantly. What's worse for a soldier to hear - someone criticizing the civilian leadership, or someone spreading propoganda that there's an active group working to make sure they're defeated?
The armed forces allow that for an hour a day, because Republicans whined so loudly they got their way. What responsible military organization would condone this as an acceptable message to beam to their troops?
Rush Limbaugh's stock position everytime he gets caught saying something stupid or offensive is "it was a joke!" The Chelsea's a dog image? Joke! Makes fun of black people? Joke! The man has a sublime sense of humor, as he's apparently able to joke about anything when his ass is on the line.
Kate O'Beirne, who's never met nonsense she couldn't spin into a wholly undeserved paycheck, decided to stick up for poor Rush. See, he was joking when he blew off the torture as nothing more than frat hazing. (It must have been a long-ass joke, because he also compared it to a Britney Spears concert, porn, and, I believe, his last family reunion after the kids went to bed - now that's a fucked-up family.)
The most unintentionally damaging part of O'Beirne's defense is her citation of Rush's genuine outrage at the abuse.
Let's summarize this as "It was bad. Now let's move on." I think that's a fair summary. Now, have you ever seen those electoral maps that show states' sizes in relation to how many electoral votes they have? It shrinks the entire American West to the size of a dime except for the coast, and blows up the Midwest like we just had one kegger too many. Let's do a similar thing with Rush's thoughts (and, sadly, those of many of his ideological compatriots):
It was bad.Now let's move on.
How'd I get on this? Well, Kevin Drum shows the Corner pulling off the rare double disingenuousness, a rare feat not seen since David Horowitz decided to restrain himself to peddling Laurie Mylroie conspiracies over at FrontPage Magazine.
Anything else from the Corner? Well, Rich "Why don't liberals care about prison abuses in American prisons like I started to three weeks ago" Lowry mocks Kerry because prisons are too cushy thanks to liberals. The magazine proper lambastes Kerry for flip-flopping despite the fact that the two quotes provided to demonstrate the contradiction aren't actually contradictory.
(As if dumber Michelle Malkin is possible. Piffle!, you say. What the fuck is piffle?, I say. Piffle on your not knowing piffle!, you respond. My foot is then broken off in one of your major orifices, and life is good.)
Anyways, Chelly-Chelle. The Washingtonienne - a story that I barely care about except that it was in my Senator's office, but which has "people on Capitol Hill talking" - is crass, vulgar, sexual, potty-mouthed, and perhaps unfresh down below, if you catch my drift.
When there was an intern in Washington serving with a Democrat implicated in sexual hijinks, it was all the fault of the media, society, culture, and the decadent and despicable Democratic Party. Now, when a staffer under a Republican is implicated in sexual hijinks...the media, society, culture, and the decadent and despicable Democratic Party. Whee!
Of course, Malkin has all the authority in the world to speak on this issue, considering she was a part of a mid-90s effort to get attractive Republican women with sex appeal out in the media. Maybe if Malkin's career wasn't based in no small part on her sex appeal, I'd at least be able to take this with a modicum of unseriousness, rather than the overflowing river of unseriousness with which I am now addressing it.
By the way, Wonkette - she called you a trash-mouthed skank. I've heard she has weak knees - just passing along a tip.
Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council are arranging "barricades" (or something, the article's headline doesn't make sense) against same-sex marriage, citing that it's more destructive than any of us know.
Why do so many religious conservatives think that Western Civilization is so fragile? Western Civilization managed to persevere through plague, famine, depression, war, slavery, etc. And although it still has its flaws, it's made definite improvements. Hitler didn't destroy Western Civilization. The Soviet Union didn't destroy Western Civilization. Bill Clinton's penis, the real-life surrogate for the Ultimate Nullifier, didn't destroy Western Civilization. But these people are going to do what the others couldn't?
(Incidentally, much the same thing was said about the War on Terror, which once again belies a complete lack of faith in America or in liberal democracy, but that's merely a sidenote.)
This brings me back to something I was thinking about last week when Dahlia Lithwick wrote a column about the inanity of most slippery-slope arguments. They're particularly bad because, in many ways, they aren't making slippery-slope arguments. Look at what the people in the article are saying. They're arguing that same-sex marriage will be the end of Western Civilization. They're not arguing that it's a slippery slope - rather, they're arguing that it's a wall. And if one thing gets through, the wall will fall, and then everything will get through. It's all or nothing. The slippery slope is analog, what they're talking about is digital. Off or on, good or evil, pure or dirty.
If same-sex marriage is allowed to occur, there will be bestiality in the streets. Not because one leads to the other, but because one is fundamentally the same as the other. Enjoy your vote, ladies and gentlemen - once the homos are done, there will be nothing left of this liberal democracy we've built up, merely a pile of gaily arranged rubble.
Quite possibly the dumbest article in the history of the National Review...this week, at least.
You know, I really do hate this "I'm more manly that you" bullshit, but there's no question that Bush started it, and that it's a campaign tack much the same as anything else. Why else does Graham know how much he bench-presses, how fast he can run his miles, etc.?
Oh, wait. Bush is a MAN, while John Kerry is FRENCH. Bush doesn't exercise for the benefit of the press...hold on. Sports Illustrated, could you get a picture from him so we could see that vein over his left temple? Thanks. Anyway, he's a man whose fitness is for himself, not for the press, and not for electoral purposes. Which is why he's going to go clear brush in 100 degree heat while the press is there, despite the fact that any rancher will tell you the only reason you'd do that is if you love heatstroke.
Not that he'd ever do this for the press's sake, but I also have it on good authority that Bush's six-pack is twice as defined as John Kerry's. You can see him on the cover of Men's Fitness, but only because John Kerry was playing hoops with his campaign staff. Desperate times call for strong press opportunities, after all.
Last night, my roommate and I (and her current roommate and her current roommate's boyfriend - it's a complex world) watched The O'Reilly Factor because, to be honest, is there any better way to kick off a Friday night than watching Bill O'Reilly angrily patronize minorities and lie his way to the number one show on cable news.
Anyway, last night he was discussing Kansas' recent plan to give in-state tuition status to illegal immigrants who were seeking legalization and had either gone to a Kansas high school for three years or who had obtained a general equivalency degree in the state of Kansas. You can read more about it here.
Of course, that's hard to repeat in total, and we know that Mr. O'Reilly prides himself on the economy of his words. For instance, "this is a place where utter douchery exists to roam free and unfettered by any such things as fact, tact, or intellectual consistency" is frequently shortened to "this is the No-Spin Zone" on the O'Reilly Factor. See how that works?
So, instead, O'Reilly and his guest discuss this plan as a plan to give scholarships to illegal immigrants. That's it. No context. None of the stuff that actually makes this bill workable, or actually makes the bill what it is. It's like describing Scarface as a movie about Cuban immigrants.
O'Reilly and his guest begin to discuss this bill in these terms. Of course, this being the O'Reilly Factor, the guest is either going to be someone who agrees entirely with what O'Reilly says, or else someone who O'Reilly can yell at until time runs out. The former was the choice for this segment, and his name was Kris Kobach. Billed merely as a "Kansas law professor", a single graphic in the first few minutes of the interview (the little Fox background info the channel runs on its talk guests) revealed something interesting: the guy's a congressional candidate in Kansas. This wasn't mentioned once by O'Reilly, and the name graphic for him read 'Dr. Kris Kobach - Professor, UMKC'. One would think you'd want to mention that the "expert" you're interviewing is a political candidate for the party that opposes the party of the person responsible for what you're debating. You know, for fairness and balance and all that crap.
After leaving out remarkably pertinent information about the topic being "debated" and the guest O'Reilly is interviewing, we were then treated to ten minutes of the duo bemoaning the liberal destruction of America's values, and a strange non-sequitur rant about illegal Pakistani immigrants moving to Kansas and getting trained in terrorism by the state's public universities, the interview was over, and we were quickly shunted to a segment about why Rosie O'Donnell is crazy for making a (admittedly very stupid) statement, from a black person who didn't like Rosie O'Donnell and a woman who didn't like Rosie O'Donnell.
After we were told to join the boycott against those "50 Cent people", we went to take pictures of cicadas and then go play pool at a bar. The beer may have ended up saving a few brain cells, I think. (Oh, and the best part of all this? It took us less than a minute to fact-check the entire segment into oblivion.)
I'm reading this appeal by Cliff May to get donations for NRO, and the only way I can read it is "NRO: 21st Century European Elitists". Not quite the appeal I think that the magazine would be making, but hey.
There are much better websites to donate to, if you are so inclined. (Hey, I still need a new computer...I can set up a little umbrella, serve some bruschetta, and misinterpret late 19th/early 20th century authors as well as the Corner can!)
Zell Miller compares the torture at Abu Ghraib to having to shower in gym class.
Yes, I remember the first time I had to shower in a locker room. It was my first time naked (or with a towel on) in front of other men. I was embarassed a little bit. However, since nobody locked the door, put a bag over my head, beat me, sodomized me with broomsticks and light sticks, forced men into sexual acts with other people, threatened my life, and took pictures of the whole thing for their amusement, I never thought to compare it to what happened in Iraq, because it wasn't even in the same galaxy of occurences.
Jesus.
He is motivated by no ideology, only a desire to get the Democratic Party to pay attention to an increasingly embarassing temper tantrum. I'm not angry at him, just sort of ashamed. I mean, I understand he's relatively new to the Democrat-bashing game, but it's not like there aren't volumes upon volumes of reference materials in multiple media that would allow Miller to construct a better bad argument than "tax and spend Taxachusetts liberal". It's not particularly accurate to begin with in light of Massachusetts' relative burden of taxation and receipt of money from the federal government...but it also smells faintly of mothballs.
Zell really needs to get up to speed on this anti-Democratic firebrand deal. I feel like I'm watching basketball without a three-point line here.
John Derbyshire just dug up his long-dead credibility and beat it with a shovel just to make good and damn sure that it died.
1. The Abu Ghraib "scandal": Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let's have a couple of courts martial for appearance's sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB.
2. The US press blowing up the Abu Ghraib business: Fury at these lefty jounalists doing down America. They just want to re-live the glory days of Vietnam, when they brought down a president they hated. (PS: They hated him because he was an anticommunist, while they themselves tought communism was just fine.)
3. GWB apologizing to some barbarian chieftain for Abu Ghraib: Disgust. Correct approach: "Mind if we film some footage in YOUR jails?"
4. Revelations about sexual hanky panky in US armed forces: Outrage. I want to see someone cashiered -- a general, at least. This is no way for soldiers to behave when on active service. Gross, unpardonable violation of military ethics. Whose damn fool idea was it to mix men and women in the same units?
Remember the Kos flap? Amazingly enough, dozens of folks like Derbyshire, who are just as prominent, if not more so, have been saying far worse things as a matter of course, yet it's like they're talking about the weather. From right-wing talk show hosts to a number of conservative writers, most of whom have far larger audiences than even the Daily Kos, they're treating the systematic abuse of people by American soldiers like it's nothing.
I'm not going to play the "where's the outrage" game here. Because there's a more serious, and more basic question at work - where's the morality?
With this inane NRO article, I have officially spent more time reading about Dennis Miller's show and politcal conversion than any person alive has actually spent watching it.
And that includes Catherine Seipp, who's apparently one Miller's defenders, yet hasn't seen the only actual segment of note in the show's history, his completely out-of-line "interview" with Eric Alterman that devolved into a slumping snit fit by Miller.
It's kind of sad, really - Dennis Miller is far more interesting as an ideological concept than he is in execution.
You know, I really do wish that conservative attitudes toward sex ensured that they wouldn't procreate and therefore instill this lunacy in their children, but, sadly, that's almost never the case. Instead, we're left insured that children around our country are going to be exposed to this particular brand of lunacy for generations to come. Case in point: Rebecca Hagelin.
After unloading a series of factoids about pornography and sexual exposure in entertainment, we're apparently supposed to intuit from those figures that it's due to our exposure to consensual sex in fictionalized formats that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib happened. There is pornography out there that is nonconsensual, or at least gets it appeal from the idea that it's nonconsensual, even if it's not. But there's a difference between that small subset of pornography and, say, an episode of Friends. In Hagelin's world, however, it's all the same thing. Rachel and Monica argue over a condom? Joey might as well be forcefully sodomizing Chandler with a foosball stick.
But it's not even the idea that all sex devolves to the nonconsensual sexual brutalization of others - it's this completely tone-deaf paragraph:
I honestly hope she realizes that she's culling these attitudes from people who are on her side, like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and many of her fellow TownHall.com pundits. You know, people who are also blaming this on attitudes toward sex in our entertainment.
Unfortunately, sexual abuse and torture doesn't happen because of any of these things. I wonder how many of the Ghraib 7 would consider themselves "Christians"? I wonder how many of them would approve of homosexuality?
I also wonder why people who are so disgusted by any sexual act that goes beyond kissing are wantonly walking around with their heads up their asses.
I have an idea for a book. It's called The Politics of Blame. It's nothing but a series of lists culling from various conservative sources every group and sub-group of liberals responsible for the world's evils. Take any major cultural phenomenon or political/military act, look it up in the book, and you'll find all of the major liberal (or "liberal") groups responsible for it.
I got this idea from V.D. Hanson's extended screed on Opinion Journal today, which, of course, manages to blame Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and academic multiculturalists for September 11th, and John Kerry (and the "left" - keep in mind he loves conflating everyone with the same general position on a single issue into having the same positions on all issues) for a rebirth of appeasement around the world.
So, TPoB will be a handy, annually-updated guide for which of us is at fault for any number of issues. By subject area, group/individual name, and special awards given out for high achievers. Are multiculturalists or feminists more responsible for Islamist terror? Who destroyed civic religion - the ACLU, Bill Clinton, or Hollywood?
We must know.
The "everyone else in the world is responsible for Abu Ghraib" meme has now not only jumped the shark, it's attached rocket boosters and taken a trip over the entire Pacific Ocean, stopping for watercress sandwiches and cheese crackers somewhere over American Samoa. Guess who's responsible for the torture at the prison now? Not women, not Muslims, not fat kids, skinny kids, or kids who like to climb on rocks.
I've seen most of the Farrelly Brothers' movies. I haven't raped anyone with a light bulb. As a matter of fact, I've managed not to rape, abuse, or torture anyone despite the fact that I've seen five of their films. This is honestly reaching epidemic levels of stupidity.
It's impossible to actually write a parody of this, because some conservative opinioneer will say something far dumber than anything you can come up with.
Joke: "Conservatives blame Yu-Gi-Oh for Abu Ghraib".
Monday's Rush Limbaugh: "I was watching this Pokemon show over the weekend, guys, and if you want to understand what happened at that prison, look no further than this show."
Tuesday's Crossfire with Robert Novak: "Why won't you liberals admit that My Little Pony changed the way these people thought about human life?"
Son, come into confession.
OK, now can I say something else?
Damn, son, yes. You have now been absolved of your responsibility towards basic human decency, now you may get around to attacking the liberal media.
Since the journalistic priesthood insists that context is everything, let's get some context. The investigation into these abuses was long and well-underway before CBS' "60 Minutes II" broke the story. In fact, it was the U.S. military that really broke the story by putting out a press release.
In January, the U.S. Central Command announced, "An investigation has been initiated into reported incidents of detainee abuse at a Coalition Forces detention facility." Other investigations were well-underway by the time CBS ran its story.
The rest of this article is premised on these faulty points, and with double bonus points for irony, let's add some context to what Jonah Goldberg is saying here. The President didn't know these photos existed. The Senate didn't know these photos existed. From the Washington Post:
The President of the United States hadn't even found out about this when the report aired. Apparently, the military's investigation, by someone's machinations, was going to be one of those "silent" public investigations where nobody knows anything about it in the interests of full disclosure. Just as God and country intended.
Jonah's been on this tear all week over at the Corner, and I'm hoping that after he's gotten out this intellectual vomit he can take a look at it and realize that he's just joining a chorus of blame-everyone-else-first conservatives who can admit that what happened was wrong, although in Jonah's case with grudging derision of the entire idea, but who can only agree that it's the fault of outside liberal forces on the military. For all the talk of "responsibility" in conservative circles, the main focus seems to be doling it out to any group that is going to be genuinely outraged by these images.
Digby writes about the selective moral outrage in this case as it compares to Bill Clinton, and it's a very good point: Clinton's actions, according to Republicans, were not supposed to represent Americans. And Republicans would do their damndest to make sure this man got out of office, because what he did was just too disgusting and despicable for words. Many of the same people can barely be forced to offer up even a token belch of disapproval of what happened at Abu Ghraib.
What this reminds me of more than anything else is the case of Jesse Dirkhising. A terrible tragedy, a 13-year-old boy was sexually abused and then killed by two men in Arkansas. However, the entire awful act was turned (again) into little more than a political grandstand. The most important part of this story wasn't the murder, wasn't the abuse, wasn't even seeing the men who did it punished. It was fingerpointing at the media and at gay rights groups. Why didn't they treat Dirkhising like Matthew Shepard? (Possibly because the Dirkhising case wasn't a crime designed to punish a person as a surrogate for an entire class of people.) The end goal was to stage the Dirkhising case as emblematic of homosexuality, as is on grotesque display here.
For all the remarkable stupidity in this paragraph alone (I'm supposing that he's just going full-out and saying that BDSM is gay-only and that there's no difference between consensual sex and non-consensual sex), it's instructive. I'm not saying Goldberg is anywhere near as offensively wrong as the above paragraph, but the mindset is similar - something awful happened and the lesson to be drawn from it must centrally focus around blaming liberals and/or "liberal" groups. I use the quotes because Andrew Sullivan is implicated as much as Michael Signorile in the above case. Are Dirkhising and the prisoners equivalent moral actors? No. But the brutality done to them is similar, and it is a part of an actual organized system paid for by you and me. And the most that WND, who pushed the Dirkhising story harder than anyone else, has been able to muster is this David Limbaugh article, which creepily contends that brutal and sadistic torture is okay so long as the right people are receiving it.
[...]
This incident is the exception involving a very small fraction of soldiers. They do not represent the average soldier, who is honorable and puts his life on the line every day to protect American security and freedom and establish Iraqi self-rule. Let's not paint our entire armed forces, the Defense Department, the Bush administration and the United States itself with a wide brush of condemnation.
Amazingly, WND couldn't afford that distinction to the homosexual community (although note that Farah discusses and ignores fantasies the men had of sexually assaulting little girls, which would seem to indicate that they were pedophiles, not sex-crazy homosexuals). And does Limbaugh think that nothing bad happened here? If so, just say it. But don't put scare quotes around the word 'victim' as if to insinuate that nobody was victimized, but you don't want to be held responsible for saying it.
I bring up Dirkhising not to slur Goldberg, but to instead provide an even more extreme example of the thought process that seems to have infested many on the right. For people who preach moral consistency and absolutism, it doesn't seem to be much of a concern. The actual problem is almost perfunctory compared to finding a way to blame the fact that it is a problem on political opponents - even though, particularly in this case, the problem shouldn't be partisan at all.
Here's a novel idea: the people who performed the actions and the people who directly abetted their prosecution should be held ultimately responsible for what happened and what happens as a result. Rather than blaming everyone else in the known world for this happening, or deciding that the real problem is with the people who are reacting to it, just realize that whatever happens as a result of those photos, it is ultimately the responsibility of the people who abused the soldiers and took the pictures. Give it a try. Just for novelty's sake.
Okay, I understand where "wingnut" came from. Someone is a right wing nut...they're a wingnut. I don't understand where moonbat came from. And it seems to have become the all-purpose response to wingnut, but it just looks like a seven-letter compound word.
Where did it come from, and how did it come to refer to members of the far left (which may or may not include every liberal, depending on your partisan stance)?
While we all ponder this, I'm going off to watch something that's been years in the making - Pacers/Heat, game 1.
Maybe I'll switch over to watch this thing on NBC, see what happens to Rita and Rusty, whatever they're called.
You know, it's kind of ironic to write a column accusing someone of lying when you're withholding just a wee bit of it yourself. Ed Driscoll even accepts, without question, Malkin's assertion that CAIR "fabricated" the quote. Don't ever accept something Michelle Malkin says as true. If she says my name is Jesse, I want the birth certificate.
What Malkin says is this:
On April 25, the Boston Globe parroted the charges in a story that quoted CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed accusing Severin of saying on his show, "I've got an idea, let's kill all Muslims."
Just one teensy problem with the story. It wasn't true. On April 27, the Globe was forced to publish a correction admitting that Severin never said "kill all Muslims." CAIR, however, has refused to admit the fabrication and continues to call for Severin's termination.
Man, that Jay Severin. Unfairly attacked by CAIR, when he never said "Kill All Muslims". Well, let me perform the stereotypical One Last Movie Check before we head out to a nice dinner and laugh this whole thing off. What did that man say?
No, they weren't. The Globe has subsequently published a correction. But though the station wouldn't give the Globe a recording of the show in question, reporter Michael S. Rosenwald got it from a service that monitors radio shows -- and that recording makes it clear that Severin was essentially taking refuge in a technicality.
WHAT? Malkin was right?!? He never did say "kill all Muslims"! CAIR is an organization without credibility, and I hereby become the world's biggest LGF booster just as soon as I get through this article.
[...]
The way Severin wiggles away from those comments is to insist, as he did to me yesterday, that he really meant Muslim terrorists. "I was never talking about, have never talked about . . . citizens, people in this country who live among us and who are not our enemies," he said.
Well, okay. Just so long as he was talking about terrorists. The dream lives on, and I'm still receiving the LGF newsletter, Stream of Idiocy.
Oh. I like those guys. I know a few of those guys. I don't want anyone to kill them...but why didn't Malkin admit that he did advocate killing some Muslims, even if it wasn't all of them? At this point, it's a distinction without a difference.
You mean I have to send back the complimentary LGF home game? Bastards.
Smack my ass and call me Sally, Ben Shapiro's book comes out tomorrow. If it's half as well-written as his column selling the book, it should be incredibly bad.
I particularly look forward to all the unintentional irony contained within, particularly Chapters 6 and 7: "Why Our Universities Are Hotbeds Of Extremism" and "Why We Need More Rush Limbaugh On Campus".
Does anybody else remember that scene in Bowling For Columbine where we get a sense of what Canadian debate is like? It looked like Bill Frist lying, except they were actually telling the truth, or seemed like. Working together? Coming to the best conclusion? Maple-tinged bullshit, I say!
I watched the segment Heather Mallick was on and wrote this column about, and if anything, she's too charitable to the show. Bill O'Reilly makes megalomania look like a temper-tantrum. He's launched a continuing series of ever-escalating threats to destroy Canada, culminating with a promise that he will (WILL) boycott Canada and so will the hordes upon hordes of people at his beck and call.
Imagine the end of Lord of the Rings, with the orcish hordes surrounding the human resistance, except that instead of muscular, brutish warriors, they're middle-aged white guys, and instead of bellowing to Sauron, they're mainly tell Aragorn to shut up, because he already had his 45 minutes to talk. World dominion? Nope, never said that. Show me a transcript where I said that, but you can't so I didn't. And there is no One True Ring. This is the No-Spin Zone, you can't come in here with your hobbits and your wizards and expect us to believe you.
We were supposed to be discussing American deserters fleeing to Canada; instead, he went off on some wild thing about the mayor of Vancouver injecting people with heroin and unless Canada shapes up, "we" will boycott you and destroy your economy, just like "we" did to France.
I said France seemed to be doing fine. He implied that France now looked like Dresden in 1945. I hadn't heard that.
I said the United States couldn't boycott Canadian goods because it would be mutually damaging. "We're your biggest trading partner."
"No, you're not." (We are.) Naturally, I wanted to reply, "Yes, we are," so that he could say "No, we're not," and then I'd say, "Everything you say bounces off me and reflects back on you, so there," but I couldn't regress that far. Mr. Doyle would have been shrieking.
Yes, O'Reilly does actually suck.
You know, every time conservatives take some facet of liberalism and try to co-opt it, it seems like they only manage to co-opt the parts they don't actually like. When religious/conservative Republicans suddenly embraced the idea of diversity, all it became about was victimization. At every turn, a conservative or a Christian was oppressed by some secularistic hegemony. Government spending? Bush is a big-ticket kind of guy, but he's really in love with the whole "spending a lot of money to do nothing" caricature of liberalism that's served us all so poorly in the past. And then, we have compassionate conservatism.
Technically, the idea of compassionate conservatism (depending on who you ask) revolves around achieving liberal ideals through the prism of religious conservatism. Help the poor, through religious facilities. It's kind of a strange argument, because the only thing it adds to traditional communitarian religiosity is the idea that it should be government subsidized. In essence, you take the worst parts of the caricature of liberal activism (government encroachment into private life), and stick it forth as a policy.
Marvin Olasky, he of the World Journalism Institute (its most famous product being Jack "Scarface" Kelly - "I ain't never seen that man cry, ain't never seen that man die") tries to come up with a compassionately conservative method of solving a milk crisis in Cuba, one which would encompass compassionate conservative principles perfectly, and not actually solve the overall problem in any meaningful way. Which would, I guess, embody compassionate conservative principles perfectly.
The issue Olasky raises is important, but the proposed solution misses the forest for the Dairy Queen. In Cuba, there's a problem with obtaining milk for children - the government gives out vouchers for the milk, and the milk is oftern watery, if the parents can obtain it at all.
Now, my read on this situation comes up with three major problems:
1.) The government controls access to milk.
2.) The milk the government controls access to is both of low quality and quantity.
3.) The system itself is poorly suited to change for the better, largely because the embargo prevents even basic staples like milk from being imported from the U.S.
And what I see in compassionate conservatism is a focus on process over results. Will that "army of compassion" get some milk into Cuba? Yes. Is our government policy ridiculous in the sense that one has to get a special visa and pay surcharges on a plane ticket to bring the packets of powdered milk into Cuba? Yes. But the point of Olasky's plan, a moving network of Christian soldiers (yep, that's why he's using the "army" speak), is virtually useless with respect to the actual problem, which is that our government policy is so onerous and so burdensome that it takes coordinated and expensive efforts like this to get packets of powdered milk into the country. Instead of an "army of compassion", why not some legislatures of common sense?
If you want to get milk into Cuba, look at why you have to specially apply for a humanitarian visa. Look at why you're only allowed to take specified amounts of powdered milk into the country. Look at why these restrictions on who can enter and leave Cuba exist, and why the Office of Foreign Assets Control spends more time and effort tracking Fidel Castro's assets than bin Laden's and Hussein's - combined.
If you're serious about getting milk, medicine, and other supplies to the Cuban people, work to lift the embargo. Humanitarian missions are admirable, and they shouldn't stop - but as a long-term runaround of the embargo's effects, and a long-term plan to influence Cuba's government and economy to escape from under Castro's rule and become a thriving democracy, doesn't this seem kind of futile?
Ah, but we're left with the underbelly of compassionate conservatism, the church functioning in the state's stead. Here's what Olasky says:
[...]
Fidel Castro’s favorite slogan these days is Un mundo mejor es possible (a better world is possible). Indeed it is, if a compassionate conservative alternative to his regime emerges.
Given what compassionate conservatism is, it's hard not to escape the conclusion that the goal in Cuba is not just humanitarian aid, or even the aid in transition from a communist government to a democratic one - the goal is to replace the communist state apparatus with a religious one. In that sense, the embargo works perfectly well - it restricts travel, the government's policy is not to provide that aid, the trade of the goods between private industry and the government (or the people) is disallowed. It allows the active arm of compassionate conservatism (read: evangelical activism) to flourish in Cuba while simultaneously making sure that there's a constant place for it to flourish.
So, the question is: is another decade-plus of embargoes (at least) worth it if it allows evangelical organizations to perform outreach through the guise of providing desperately needed goods? My answer's no. Olasky's is yes. I'd rather see Cubans with the goods they need now, preparing for a democratic future through exposure to capitalism and international democratically provided aid than preparing for it years down the road armed with Bibles and packets of powdered milk.
Well, that's sort of what I heard someone say about something someone else said.
That's disgusting, Mickey.
Ah, the legal acumen of William O'Reilly.
There's a student at a high school who's making his sexuality a part of his campaign for Student Council. O'Reilly's debating a civil rights attorney, and when it's O'Reilly against anyone who knows more than him (i.e., any guest who disagrees with him), you immediately know that it's up to Bill to start making up the factual deficit with the Weird Irrelevant Shit surplus. Anyway, the discussion trends towards a discussion of what's considered "disruptive" under the auspices of the law. Paraphrased from their conversation:
O'Reilly: "So, what if they guy runs on a cross-dressing platform? Would that be disruptive?"
Civil Rights Attorney: "Probably not - there are certain thresholds you must meet in order for the school to be able to take action against you."
O'Reilly: "What if he runs as a Nazi? Has a swastika on his sign? Would that be disruptive?"
What in hell does running as a Nazi have to do with pointing out that you're homosexual? Yes, the whole extinction of the Jews and other inferior races thing would very likely be disruptive. But as far as I can tell from my official copy of the Gay Agenda, homosexuality isn't Naziism against straight people.
Maybe I need to get the update?
Conservative talk host Jay Severin has been in a wee bit of trouble for advocating that the vast majority of Muslims, particularly those in the United States, be killed. Technically, he's telling the truth when he says this:
He didn't say that all Muslims are terrorists, true. He just said they were:
He said: "My suspicion is that the majority of Muslims in the United States, who regard themselves as Muslims first and not as Americans really at all, see an American map one day where this is the United States of Islam, not the United States of America. I think it pays to harbor those suspicions."
See? Not nearly as bad. He didn't say that all Muslims are terrorists. He did, however, say that most Muslims would one day become terrorists when the opportunity presented itself.
Completely different.
Roger Ailes brings up a second instructive lie, that when Severin was talking about "the vast majority of Muslims in the United States", he was actually talking about Muslims outside of the United States.
Which, of course, would simply excuse the whole thing if it were true...and if I were high.
What's more disturbing to me than even the paranoid bigotry masquerading as political analysis is that these people aren't as far gone as Ann Coulter - they realize that what Severin said was wrong, at least enough to try and obscure what was actually said. In a sense, that makes them worse, because they don't even have the courage of their incredibly stupid convictions. Even for them, it's not defensible on its own merits.
Tim Noah goes over Dick Morris' latest Hillary power-grabbing fantasies (to accompany his upcoming book, Rewriting History, which is sort of like a gigantic blog entry that mixes his Lamisil-laced remembrance of the Clinton years with his undying fervor for believing that nothing in life happens without the Clintons overseeing it).
Back when I was in high school, I attended a writing program at Wright State University. One of the activities we did was a group writing bit where each person wrote a sentence in a story, one after the other, and then we read the story aloud after it had been "completed" (i.e., we'd made enough turns through to have something worth reading, at least in terms of length). Could we just have a sort of jam-session Hillary conspiracy with some of the leading lights of the anti-Hillary brigade? Morris, William Safire, Emmett Tyrell, Rush Limbaugh, etc. could join up each one adding a sentence to the ultimate "Hillary's Gonna Run" op-ed.
"Then, Hillary pulled out an Uzi and riddled Kerry full of holes, then she pulled off her brief white panties-"
"Goddammit, O'Reilly, who invited you?"
Myth #1: V.D. Hanson can make an effective argument in favor of his positions. Just take a look at this column.
V.D. Hanson has a very particular way of writing that's echoed throughout many of his columns, last week's also being a sterling example of this.
The result? The price of gas skyrocketed, in part because at least some Gulf OPEC autocratic states vented by cutting production. America was shown in fact to have had little influence concerning, much less any control of, the very petroleum that lay beneath the country it now occupied and had bled for. Suddenly Mr. Kerry and other senators decried not the worry over petroleum theft but the spikes in energy prices, demanding redress from the administration. Apparently Mr. Bush, the one-time unilateralist who had turned a deaf ear to Arab entreaties and had been too tough with Arab regimes, now suddenly was not unilateral enough with such greedy despots. Indeed, he was to be condemned for not confronting those about oil whom he had already "unnecessarily" once confronted purportedly over oil.
Note what Hanson does here (and it's what he does in his most recent article as well). First, he pares down any position that opposes his to a woefully inaccurate caricature. Then, he conglomerates positions that have nothing to do with each other into one idea, which he then refutes. Unsurprisingly, he can come up with really strong, coherent rebuttals to the stances that he's created. In this section, for instance, Hanson manages to take two positions espoused by two different sources, and then combine them into one position that's supposedly contradictory (granted, it's not, because he also manages to conflate going to war with exerting diplomatic pressure...but we expect better?)
In both cases, Hanson manages to argue against positions that are a mix of reality and his own selective editing, and look like a million bucks doing it, if you buy into everything that he says. The best part? In his first article about the "five myths", he manages to argue against at least one position by conducting a different argument entirely.
If I were conservative, my career would be a lot further along than it is right now. I even come prepackaged with a marketable gimmick!
Q: Doesn't John Leo realize that even though Bush was supposedly asked the same question multiple times, he never answered it, not even once?
A: No.
Q: Isn't the fake questioner/answerer dialogue between the strong and "correct" questioner asking essentially rhetorical questions and the sycophantic phantom answerer who eventually bows to my logical onslaught really lame?
A: Was that directed to me? Because I'm nobody's sycophant. I just happen to believe that you're very, very right about everything, or else can be easily convinced within a few sentences.
Q: At what point does this start breaking down from a series of question and answers to you and me just having a conversation where we each reaffirm the obvious point of the article that we're not skilled enough writers to actually build to?
A: Right about now.
Q: I guess you're right.
A: Yep.
Does anyone want to be on this ship when Bush loses?
(Apparently, the answer is yes. My idea of a minor hell is being in an enclosed space for a week with a bunch of bitterly angry conservatives, because the glee would quickly turn to just feeling sad about human existence after the twentieth time I heard someone's theory on why Kerry is a Saddamite traitor, but maybe that's just me.)
Question: when the right side of the blogosphere and right-leaning pundits inevitably embrace this year's Miss USA for using her position to vocally support the war in Iraq, will we finally, finally be able to point out that conservatives love celebrities in politics, they just also love finding the most convenient weapon with which to bludgeon any critic, no matter how little sense it makes.
What's amazing is that the major attention given to celebrities before and during the Iraq war seemed to come more from conservatives bitching about the celebrities than from the celebrities themselves.
Dennis Prager just received his shiny new Private First Class D.B. (Douchebag Brigade) pin, and he's already got his eye on those Corporal stripes. Apparently bereft of women to deride, he now chooses to defend one from the witheringly misogynistic, racist glare of Bob Kerrey.
"Thank you, Dr. Rice. Let me say at the beginning I'm very impressed, and indeed I'd go as far as to say moved by your story, the story of your life and what you've accomplished. It's quite extraordinary."
[...]
It is almost inconceivable that Sen. Kerrey would have said anything analogous to any other American (with the possible exception of one from Mexico or Puerto Rico) -- a Japanese, a Jew, a Pole, a German, a Uruguayan -- no matter how impressive their rags to power story.
Now, looking at Rice's bio, regardless of her race or gender, she has done quite a bit - and yes, she did overcome structural impediments against her race and gender to do what she did. Prager appears to be patronizing anyone who's lived through our nation's history of those impediments - they didn't really overcome anything.
Anyways, Prager seems to be gearing up to give us an example of the kind of person who should receive effusive praise from The Condescender (coming soon to Marvel Comics' monthly lineup), but won't because liberals hate wimmin 'n' minorites.
Yet, one cannot imagine a senator beginning a hearing with Henry Kissinger noting how impressed he was with Mr. Kissinger's life story. Why not? Because many liberals and most Democratic leaders do not take blacks and women as seriously as they take whites and men.
You choose a wanted war criminal as a hypothetical example? I think most people wouldn't be too effusive in their praise of Kissinger because if he leaves the country, he will be arrested and likely tried for gross crimes against humanity. When your life story includes that, I'm likely to be fairly tempered in my impressions of you. Perhaps not for a PFC-DB, but long have I been rejected from that august institution for my inability to pass the final test - how to be a hypocrticial, crypto-racist asshole when choosing between white and wheat bread.
My belief that an entire class of people are racist explains the folly of declaring that an entire class of people are racist.
Of course, the only proof that Prager marshalls up is that by accusing whites of racism, one must de facto be racist, a brand of circular logic so bad that Slinkie's suing him for copyright infringement.
It must be an early harvest season, because this guy is cherry-picking like a mother fucker. Noted friends to women Newt Gingrich and Bob Packwood are, of course, left out. But, then again, in the Brigade, rhetorical force is marshalled with all due speed, other logistics like facts and common sense best left to the cleanup crews.
It's a hard life. But someone's gotta do it to protect our reactionary politics.
Oh, and I'm liberal, so I hate minorities. Including myself. Time to head upstairs for the twenty minutes of patronizing. Today, I think I'll talk about what a nice shave I got for "one of them".
Yes, Jonah. And then, when we found that out, instead of sitting on his ass and hoping that the CIA and FBI would provide him with some sort of information independent of his asking for it, he actually, you know, got concerned about terror.
Monday mornings at the Corner are always the bitterest time of the week. Everyone comes back ready to toothlessly savage the "liberal media" (especially Katie Couric), and there's always that initial flood where nobody can actually react to any news in any manner other than whether or not its verbiage is some sort of secret anti-conservative code. Unfortunately, that flood tends to carry on until Sunday night, stymied only temporarily by tales of John Derbyshire's kids stripping and ogling his Ann Coulter doll and releasing Bush's remarkably effete Easter menu.
Kevin Drum finds Jay Nordlinger arguing that if you don't want a Wal*Mart in your community, you hate America. Particularly if you, as a consumer and as a voter, decide that you don't want a particular store in your community. It's just the height of communism for consumers to resist a business that will bring dozens of minimum-wage, overworked positions to a community while simultaneously crushing any hope of competing businesses bringing other jobs anywhere near the community.
The best part is that the government of Inglewood would have had no say in the construction of the store if the referendum had passed!
Government around the people, sort of near the people, and technically, although not realistically, for the people. That's the kind of government Jefferson intended...on his more absynthe-influenced nights, at least.
I really wish these assholes would, for once, admit that you can both want the operation in Iraq to succeed and realize that things aren't going so well. The two are not mutually exclusive, unless you're so blinded and oversensitive to any criticism, no matter how valid, that all of it must be denied.
Jonah Goldberg writes today that Iraq is getting served.
After setting up a field of strawmen ten wide and ten deep, he proceeds to knock them over in a petulant rampage, crushing the massive liberal defense of Third World suffering and anguish as well as its hatred of, I assume, women. As I well know, given my long arrest record for assaulting people who held doors open for others.
However, he doesn't hit his true stride until he decides to pass judgement on all of Iraq. Taking the position of the true ideologue, the ongoing insurgency and the chaos that's broken out across the country is all the fault of Iraqis, and not the terrorists, but the regular folk, the ones whose country we came to liberate.
So, when we talk about how the US should have done this or that, or how the Bush administration has botched or blown one thing or another, let’s also keep in mind that according to literally any rational set of criteria, laid or by the left or the right, the Iraqi people are the ones who are blowing it the most – both the ones shooting in the streets and the ones hiding in their homes. Sure, they’ve got reasons and excuses, including having been brutalized, propagandized and badly educated, but those excuses don’t change the fact that “blaming the victim” in a sense is appropriate. The Iraqis, broadly speaking, are fools for doing what they’re doing right now. And the only way to see it otherwise, it seems to me, is if you do not subscribe to the view that Iraqis are rational people.
Call it spicy, saucy, tangy or salty - Iraq just got served.
Iraq: fools, irrational...or irrational fools? Never has the ongoing situation in Iraq been laid out so clearly, so concisely, so...Goldbergianly. (Yes, that's a new word - patent it, poke it, prod it, slap it, shove it, and spank it in a catsuit, just don't take it without telling everyone it's mine.)
Now, I seem to remember catcalls from various folks over the past few months pooh-poohing people who opposed the war for not believing that Iraqis were capable of democracy (hell, it even came from Chalabi himself). Goldberg's stance doesn't speak too well of the Iraqi people - through absolutely no fault of our own, those ingrates can't even martialize and deal with the minor terrorist insurgency in their own country, despite the fact that whatever army and police they had prior to March 2003 is probably either a part of that insurgency, long gone, or long dead.
My question is: it was obvious when we went in that ethnic and religious tensions would rage. From everything I've read, intelligence services were predicting this exact sort of insurgency after the fall of Saddam. It was known that these forces were going to be at play before we invaded. Now, Jonah could be right, and the Iraqis could be an irrational, foolish group of people who won't accept our carefully considered and tailored plan for their country...or we just did a bad job of planning for the realities of post-war Iraq, and the Iraqis are reacting to that.
I tend towards the latter (although the correct answer is more complex than that, I don't think mass irrationality on the part of 25 million people is *quite* the answer)...but it's mainly because I don't have my Iraqi-bashing credentials from the National Warblogger Consortium yet.
I predict that Peggy Noonan will next week write something totally divorced from reality...and it'll feature Jesus and firefighters...and the erotic subtext will be so blatant that John Ashcroft will have her investigated and potentially imprisoned for peddling obscene materials.
Afterwards, she will admit that her entire career has been spent being too lazy to do actual research, or critically think about anything but some rather detailed fantasies involving a heart, a cross, a flag, three gallons of baby oil and two full precincts of the FDNY.
Kevin Drum thankfully helps me inforce my new editorial policy, which is never to refer to Instapundit directly. It's hard, because he's the Kevin Bacon of the blogosphere - anything stupid can be related back to him somehow within six links.
There's an interesting thing about metaphors. Somehow, it never sinks in, despite the fact that it's repeated constantly: ANALOGIES DON'T IMPLY A DIRECT, ONE-TO-ONE COMPARISON. Like, see, when I said that Instapundit is the Kevin Bacon of the blogosphere I didn't mean that he shows his penis too much - I meant that everything can be linked back to him.
However, I can now become the...sixth? Seventh? stupid "controversy" of the past week, en route to the Decalogue of shit that wasn't offensive. (In this case, Kennedy said that Iraq was Bush's Vietnam because he lied out of his ass about it...worthy of no less than six separate outpourings of offense from a man who can muster more of it than Bob Barker can dinette sets.)
Oh, and don't miss the part where Glenn aligns with the Nation of Islam against Air America. Yes...that Nation of Islam. Why he can align with the anti-Semites? Nobody knows...
And if the anti-Semitism thing isn't enough to get Glenn, Alton Maddox has also been seen somewhere in the vicinity of Al Sharpton. Now he'll be rescinding that link.
I'm convinced that Alan Keyes' Renew America is simply a front group for people who got fired from their local Arby's for coming into work drunk. That can be the only explanation for the consistent intellectual rigor on display there. (And no offense to the fine people who work at Arby's, now or in the past.)
Such is the dominionof Dennis Campbell, who writes the following (paraphrased):
Of course, any person employed or endorsed by the host of Alan Keyes Is Making Sense may not be the repository of concise and intelligent thought that I once hoped.
Somebody's chain-smoking grandmother wrote this article, which I suppose I would be angry over if it had any chance of becoming law. You've probably seen it around - Kaye Grogan, who appears to be one of a legion of conservative pundits who managed to gain some sort of perch while having no grasp of facts, reality, or basic communicative skils, wrote an article proclaiming that it needs to be a felony to launch an "unfounded accusation" against a president. Now, given that we already have libel and slander laws, and the proposal is blatantly unconstitutional, and that it would turn all of politics into a debate between Zell Miller and himself...it's still pretty goddamned stupid.
Yeah, because Lord knows a statute like that would never, ever be used to shut off criticism of a president. Ever. Would there be Commission of Presidential Falsehoods set up to adjudicate all of these responses? Would I be able to turn in my neighbor for telling me that Bush's economic plan lost 3 million jobs, which is false, since it's only around 2 million now?
GULAG!
Oh, so now I get it...you can just ignore whatever anyone else says, and let partisans enforce the law. My favorite chain-smoking grandmother (of the day, there's just so many) has a good point. In the course of history, has criminializing political speech that goes against the current ruler ever limited freedom?
Not that I care to bring up and imperil my position in His Republican Highness' Reign.
Sadly, this isn't exactly limited to the political movement of Alan "The Human Fringe" Keyes, the idea that criticizing Bush is offensive. And of course criticism of Bush is political - he's a goddamn politician.
So speaketh the First Rider of the Populist Armageddon of Keyes, riding upon a crescent wave of righteousness and knowledge of electoral patterns so instinctive that she's not afraid to contradict every available poll for no discernible purpose.
Oh, my God. How awesome is it when an uber-partisan, factually bereft commentator starts giving the opposition party unsolicited advice? I mean, thankfully, it's rare, so its novelty and usufruct never wear off, but it's just so exciting, this honest and open exchange of ideas!
I also love scraping my eyeballs with shards of broken glass!
Yeah! Terry McAullife is just unfair! Let's outlaw unfairness! NOW, you magnificent bastards. This can't wait. Me and Rob Reiner and that guy from South Park with the curly hair are going to transcend our political differences, march on Washington, and demand that our criticism of George Bush be submitted to Official Censor Kaye Grogan between smoke breaks.
(And McAullife in no way started the AWOL accusation - at least have the honesty to slur the right guy who didn't start the AWOL accusation: Michael Moore. Christ.)
Lesson number one from this piece: distracted writing is dangerous. This bit really sounds like she was right in the middle of the last episode of 7th Heaven, trying to figure out how those brilliant writers could extend the same plotline with minor and contrived changes to eight different characters at the same time. So taxing, so exhausting is this, that you're left with ellipses that don't signify a calculated pause, but instead you forgetting what the hell the end of that sentence was supposed to be.
And "about like an ice cube in 600 degree temperatures in Hades"? First, specifiying the exact temperature in hell is sort of redundant. It's hot. We get it. The hotness of it is not made any more impressive or real by saying just how hot it is.
How hot is Hell? Hot enough to be a standard of hotness. Therefore, you add nothing when you further describe its hotness except to diminish the impact of how hot it is. That's dumber than a dumbass with a 35 IQ.
I won't mention that you can't have a "biggest majority" unless you're comparing majorities between issues, and even then, there are much larger majorities on other issues, depending on the issue asked. I won't mention it at all.
I will, however, mention that her polling results seem to be from the same firm as her poll results on American trust of Democrats, given that the "biggest majorities" of Americans seem to approve of at least some form of abortion rights. She should really look into their methodology, which seems to be making up shit in moments not reserved looking for the exact print to clash with the American flag.
Okay...this is the first time she's actually taken a step back and not advocated a dictatorship, a fantasy world, or a torrid sexual fantasy involving Alan Keyes, an argyle sweater, and a broken elevator. (Sorry, folks, that one's in the subscriber's version.) Let's see what she has to say about this.
Well, we seem to have completely distanced ourselves from the original point entirely...
I don't support this, largely because I don't think that legislative positions should be term-limited. There's simply too much difference between a legislative position and an executive one, and the power that one wields, for the former to be subjected to term limits like the latter.
(Yes, we will get back to mocking the craziness in a bit. But it's only fair to treat her ideas with the respect they deserve, and that goes for the merely bad ones alongside the crazy ones.)
I mess up words sometimes, and I'll gladly correct them. And I'll do the same thing when I notice other people's usage errors.
Now, personally, I want an astute politician in office representing me and my community's interests. I want someone shrewd and perspicacious. Astute, if anyone was wondering, means clever and capable. Yes, let's fill Washington with people who aren't that good at their job. That would solve all our problems.
Damn this astuteness proliferation. Next to WMDs, it's the thing most damaging to our national security.
Actually, considering how hard it can be for rookie and sophomore representatives, in particular, to get anything pushed through, and the learning curve that comes with being a first-term senator...I like Snickers bars.
Oh, sorry - I got Groganated for a second there. Legislatures are communities. So are executive offices, but they're much more determined by the executive and their surrounding people, and can be reformed to suit each successive executive. Legislatures don't work like that.
Don't worry, this brief lapse into wrongheaded sanity is over...now.
Damn skippy! Although who do we blame for something like this, where a death threat is tossed off casually just to gain fame?
Now what, you may ask, the fuck did that have to do with term limits? Not shit, I may answer.
On to the main event, however. We have to outlaw criticism of the president (well, "false" criticism, but isn't it all false) because it might turn the teenagers of America into killing machines.
Yes, this woman is a professional writer. Yes, she accused Kerry, Kennedy and Clarke of making "motivational charges" against the president. No, I don't know why that's a bad thing - "George W. Bush, ladies and gentlemen, has it within him to eat 10 hot dogs in a minute. Yes, I said it." And yes, this will all lead to a nation of high schoolers putting "plotting to kill the president" on their college applications unless we stop them from falsely motivating the president - particularly if that motivation is ambidextrous.
To save our nation, George W. Bush must not be encouraged to work on his baseball swing. And he must certainly not be encouraged to become a switch-hitter. Or else the very fabrical of our nation is at steak...my foot hurts.
I'm sighing as I even write this.
Kathleen Parker has called for nuking the Sunni Triangle. Keep in mind the woman writes for both the Orlando Sentinel and is on USA Today's Board of Contributors.
Note that nuking this area would require nuking a significant portion of Iraq, likely including Baghdad.
Let our outrage at the degradation of the right, and their vile disrespect for the lives of Iraqi civilians run rampant. Let's contact every other person who writes on Townhall and force them off the site, lest they be attached to her words, along with a disavowal of her advocacy of what would amount to mass murder.
You may continue the outrage below, also mentioning how she endorsed the murder of all of the Democratic candidates earlier this year.
ADDENDUM: The point of this entry is that objectionable things are said all the time, and they become particularly offensive when you decide to up the partisan outrage meter. Nothing more, nothing less.
As much as I love arguing, there's a point at which you have to take a step back and realize that to even argue a point is to to lose, in that legitimizing it as something worthy of debate gives it the credibility that it's so desperately searching for. Gary Aldrich makes just such a point today.
This is going to define a lot of 2004, and I have a feeling I'm going to need to get some dental work done in December after seven months of grinding my teeth through such baldly stupid insinuations. One of the hardest parts of political discourse is realizing that sometimes, you just have to leave stupid things alone.
UPDATE: Okay, I really could have chosen something better - for instance, something that wasn't being trafficked on national television. This is really an incredibly stupid line - by the time we get to the end of it, the mark of a president should be how poorly he's running the country. The worse the chief executive is, the more he should be reelected!
Think of it this way - any leader is going to waging some sort of war against terrorism/enemies of the country. Those enemies are, of course, going to be critical of the leader. At the same time, political opposition is going to be highly criticial of the leader as well, in a very different sense. The worse the leader does, the more criticism he's going to receive. But, in this mindset, the more you criticize the president, the more you're a part of every other critic of the president, whether it's the honorable opposition or the murderous terrorists. Therefore, the worse a president does, the more immune from criticism he should be...or else you're on the side of the enemy.
To which I say, here's my ass, now look between the lines and find yourself.
My pink-tinged thug life is infecting my cranium and my mental facilities. All I can think of. All I want to do is roll down the street in my paisley Escalade, sippin' on wine coolers and watching Jason's Lyric in my dashboard DVD.
All this means, of course, is that I'm disrespecting the traditional mores of Moonie-owned fatherhood.
Just a little brainwashiing and a lifetime subscription to Insight Magazine. And these handy Moon-shaped air fresheners. If they seem to be talking to you, or your head hurts after more than three minutes of exposure to them, just lay down and think about not divorcing your spouse.
Come on baby, light my fire/I'm your insane cult Messiah!
You know, the idiotic psychoanalysis masquerading as clever observation schtick got old back in 2000 when we started hearing about "earth tones" - now, it's like watching someone tote out their old Klymaxx CDs and Moonlighting tapes (Betamax!) and pretend they're introducing you to something new.
Here comes the world's biggest Who's The Boss? fan, Kathleen Parker, taking us on an uncomfortable journey through the painful reminder that no, kids, you can't go back again. Not to disrespect the overall fecundity of the idiocy in this piece, but I just had to bring up this part:
Then you catch Kerry, who shouldn't need to prove his manhood - he served in Vietnam, you know - engaging in preppy sports that require resorts and expensive equipment: skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing. Not exactly the populist sports of choice.
Generally, I don't think that clearing brush on your large ranch is considered a very manly activity - it's just a ridiculously stupid one, particularly in blazing heat when you can either hire people or get a machine to do the same thing. And isn't buying a ranch to look manly a hell of a lot less populist than snowboarding down a mountain?
Well, I guess we're also going back to the 80s again, for some Big Gipp worship. Oh, hold on...it's the Gipper. Although I think the former might really shake things up a little bit...
When you don't know what humor is, don't comment on it. (Is it just me, or is today stern taskmaster day?)
By the way, heavily partisan sites should also refrain from using requested feedback from readers to make any sort of point about how anyone but partisans feel about something. Taranto says that of 111 letters written to an deeply conservative site, 108 support his/its viewpoint. Wow.
If I told every reader of Pandagon to tell me who they were voting for in the next election, does anyone not think that it would tilt incredibly heavily towards people who supported Kerry? Would it prove anything? Well, except for the fact that I can run thought exercises (quick, tell me what comes to your mind when I say "pink elephant"!), no.
A bit of advice from me: resist the urge to make what you think are really clever observations about something that's supposed to tie your supposed thesis together without actually exploring the answer to the question you pose.
Diana West asks how, exactly Richard Clarke could possibly have any credibility after seemingly contradicting himself...as if Clarke never offered up an explanation for his statements, including the rather obvious point that the statements don't contradict - they just have a different focus.
By the way, catch Kaus Hackula on Clarke:
CLARKE: Last time I had to declare my party loyalty, it was to vote in the Virginia primary for president of the United States in the year 2000. And I asked for a Republican ballot.
There's no direct contradiction--just a clear willingness to mislead. This doesn't encourage trust in Clarke when it comes to his bigger points.
Alas, Mickey Kaus is able to root out the "deep-seated character flaws" even in Richard Clarke - he's a Republican who voted for a centrist Democrat (after voting for and supporting John McCain while he was still employed by Bill Clinton)! He shows a disturbing tendency not to support George W. Bush! Therefore, he's a misleader!
Does opposing Dick Clarke immediately make you dumb, or is it the other way around?
Jonah Goldberg has a very strange post on the Corner. He lauds the conservative embrace of philosophers and thinkers (however erroneous that embrace may be), yet ponders with an obviously made-up mind that liberals don't adhere to the same attachment to philosophical lineage that conservatives do, even going so far as to give this assessment of conservatism:
That statement leads me to believe that Jonah doesn't hang out around many non-elite conservatives, if any, and that his relative realm of conservative intake is narrowly tailored, at best. But that's beside the point.
I think it may go to two phenomena: first, one can argue that the 20th Century, and indeed most of the history of Western Civilization from the Enlightenment on, is the eventual, if painful, triumph of liberal actions. Putting aside Jonah's inane "liberals are all emotion and lashing out" idea (which would explain why most academics are liberals, I guess), liberal actions have shaped the current political, social and cultural landscape in a way that conservative efforts to preserve the status quo haven't.
The second goes to a quote from John Stuart Mill:
In general, any liberalizing, progressive movement is going to be arguing for action, while a conservative movement is going to be arguing for a philosophical justification of the preservation of the status quo. In short, action vs. preservation. In a lot of ways, Jonah's dichotomy reminds me of old bromides against Christians who couldn't recite the Scriptures. Someone who understands the message of the Bible, who practices it and lives it, is somehow inferior to the Christian who can cite Bible verses at you ad nauseum.
Out of curiosity...isn't the knock against Kerry, and also against Gore back in 2000, that they're too academic, cerebral, intellectual and aloof, while Bush was more down to earth and action-oriented? He was a man of the heart, while his opponents were/are men of the head. He's not a big reader, doesn't know much about why he believes what he does, but he's damn sure that he believes it.
Funny that he would spring from a movement supposedly wholly in touch with its intellectual and philosophical roots. Is the right full of self-hating academics?
I love this piece on David Brooks, mainly because it reveals what was originally an influential, if cloying series of observations as a series of factually bereft ejaculations made up to advance a thesis that isn't borne out at all.
He's very emblematic of the whole breed of conservative sociologists, people who see America as some conveniently delineated series of conservative and liberal bastions, who can only see the Home Depots and Wal*Marts of Red America and the upscale coffee shops and specialty boutiques of Blue America.
My favorite part is Brooks' response: "You're taking a joke and distorting it." After which he accuses the author of unethical behavior, truly a classy move (Disclaimer: Sasha and I attended Swarthmore together, although he graduated before I did). Brooks lays out a political and cultural topography of Red and Blue America, although the way he does it is predisposed towards reinforcing his point. Take the Red Lobster tale:
Well, damn. If "mini-dinners" are the course of the day, then I can prove Kettering (an affluent suburb to the south of Dayton) is part of Brooks' mistaken conception of "Red America" by going to L'Auberge and ordering a cheap appetizer and water. It's impossible to spend $20 there!
Sasha did excellent work on this one. And Brooks' prior reputation is taking a true beating.
Because he was trolling here for a while the past couple of days, and because I've been having hours of unintended fun marveling at the continual lowering of the intellectual standards needed to make a complete (if nonsensical) sentence on ready display at his site, I thought I'd direct everyone back towards "Lying Liars", the "factcheck" on Al Franken with enough mind-boggling stupidity on a single page to keep TBogg busy for a week.
This is what happens when old men make laws affecting young women:
The bill would make such mutilation punishable by two to 20 years in prison. It makes no exception for people who give consent to have the procedure performed on their daughters out of religious or cultural custom.
...
Amendment sponsor Rep. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, was slack-jawed when told after the vote that some adults seek the piercings.
"What? I've never seen such a thing," Heath said. "I, uh, I wouldn't approve of anyone doing it. I don't think that's an appropriate thing to be doing."
The ban applies only to women, not men.
Following up that last post on South Park Republicans, it looks like the entire "young Republican" revolution was a lot of hype mixing the undying ability of some people to be amazed that conservatives can still exist under the assault of sociology professors and the Vagina Monologues, along with the not-inconsequential fear of "liberal bias" accusations. An Ipsos/Newsweek poll surveying young voters (sent to me by Praktike) gives us the following results in a survey of 354 young voters with an MOE of 5.2%:
Definitely re-elect Bush: 32%
Consider voting for someone else: 20
Definitely vote for someone else: 46
Not sure: 2
And if the election for Congress were held today, would you want to see the Republicans or Democrats win control of Congress?
Republicans: 39%
Democrats: 51
Neither (vol.): 6
Not sure: 4
If the election for president were held today and the candidates were George W. Bush, the Republican, John Kerry, the Democrat, and Ralph Nader, the independent, for whom would you vote? Do you lean more toward John Kerry, the Democrat, or George W. Bush, the Republican, or Ralph Nader, the independent?
Bush 36%
Undecided, lean Bush 2
Kerry 46
Undecided, lean Kerry 1
Nader 10
Undecided, lean Nader 2
Other (vol.) 2
Not sure 1
Overall, do you approve, disapprove or have mixed feelings about the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president? (If approve or disapprove, ask:) Is that strongly approve/disapprove or somewhat approve/disapprove? (If have mixed feelings or not sure, ask:) If you had to choose, do you lean more toward approve or disapprove?
Strongly approve 22%
Somewhat approve 10
Lean toward approval 12
Still have mixed feelings 2
Lean toward disapproval 15
Somewhat disapprove 5
Strongly disapprove 34
Kerry can win young voters.
I watched last night's episode of South Park (mediocre, at best), but what really caught my attention was Cartman. Given that the episode was half about him, not surprising, but the character has a strong allegiance to The Passion of the Christ, which has been popping up this season and which will likely come full circle next week when Kyle goes to see the film.
Now, Cartman is a virulent anti-Semite. Over the course of eight seasons, virtually every episode has featured him attaching some flaw to Kyle because of his Jewishness. From South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut:
Kyle: Cartman, I *am* Jewish!
Cartman: There, there, don't be hard on yourself, Kyle.
[...]
Kyle: Let me have some more candy, Cartman.
Cartman: Let's see, hmm, I don't have any Jewish candy.
So on, so forth. Now, in next week's episode, Kyle goes to see The Passion. And from every indication in the preview, he's thoroughly disgusted, even freaked out about it. And the anti-Semite Cartman has a poster of it in his room.
Somehow, I think that we'll be seeing the final death knell of South Park Republicans next Wednesday by 10:30 ET - just in time to celebrate to a new episode of Chappelle's Show!
The Hill has an interview with Zell "Mickey Kaus Is My Illegitimate Child" Miller today.
Besides pointing out that John Kerry went from "one of this nation's authentic heroes" and "one of this party's best known and greatest leaders" to a "liberal" who is "trying to have it both ways on so many issues" (ironic, then, that Miller would be accusing Kerry of flip-flopping), he also shows off a tasty penchant for writing off the entire South to Democrats based on the worst possible reasoning.
“You know what it takes to win an election in South Carolina — 585,000 votes,” he said, citing a figure that approximates GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham’s 2002 vote total.
That amount is more than four times Edwards’s vote in the South Carolina primary. Likewise, in Georgia the combined Democratic primary vote this year was less than half of the votes that President Bush got when he carried the state in 2000.
I'm not sure how much of this is the writer's gloss on Miller's statement, but if we predict general election results from primary turnout, seven percent of Republicans are going to show up to the polls. The majority of general election voters don't show up for primaries - if we used the latter to predict the former, we might as well predict the average attendance for regular-season baseball games by looking solely at the preseason.
Well, in general, you like to have Democrats at those things. Just a thought.
I really want to see a political campaign run by the Corner's readers. Like life, it would be nasty, short and brutish, with the added benefits of being entirely confusing, pointless, and direly in need of an editor.
Rove obviously wanted a book from Bush's former adviser to come out in the middle of campaign season and have allegations of his incompetence on terror rebutted by incompent, desperate political hacks spitting out contradictory and offensive attacks.
And that Rand Beers thing is dead set to take Clarke down - Rand Beers connections are like the kiss of death. I remember I was out on a date, and we were having a great conversation, but there was a lull. And I asked her, "How about that Rand Beers?"
She stared at me, her mouth slightly open, looking at me like I'd just asked "How about killin' those Jews?" She stuttered before choking out, "Did you say Rand Beers?" I smiled, hoping to show off my intricate knowledge of the long-time civil servant's service to presidents from Reagan through Bush II, perhaps even theorizing why he left the Bush Administration mere days before the invasion of Iraq.
Sadly, it was not to be.
She stood up, shaking, and flew at me in a frothing rage, screaming incoherently. All I could make out in the resulting flurry of hair, nails, and moderately-priced dishware flying around my head were a series of high-pitched screeches and one long, hard bellow of "I DECRY RANK PARTISANSHIIIIIIIP!"
Fuck Rand Beers.
In our hearts, we're all Manchurian students. At least, according to the clear-minded and above all else, not brainwashed Dennis Prager.
If you went to secular schools, you're brainwashed. If you're liberal, you're brainwashed. If you say you're not brainwashed, you're brainwashed. Chances are, if you're reading this, you're brainwashed, and I'm influencing your brainwashing cheetah with the words that I'm saying right now, only deepening the control of the massive liberal conspiracy, which is ultimately controlled by the ACLU for the purpose of getting some plaques taken away from the Grand Canyon.
(Go to Paypal and transfer $200 into my account, each of you. Your liberal master commands it. Come back here and finish reading this post when you are done. Go.)
By the way, after blurting out that all liberals are closed-minded and never come into contact with religion and/or conservatism, he then says that liberals argue through epithets...of which "closed-minded" and "brainwashed" aren't, because Dennis Prager is allowed to define words in whatever ways make him giggle.
I'm really glad that he argues with ideas and facts rather than awful logic and debate-ending name-calling, because otherwise he wouldn't be worthy of serious consideration as a political thinker. Next week's article: Why The Left Are The True Racists, Because Calling People Racist Is Wrong And What Racists Do.
Coultered (kohl'-turd) v. - To have a statement which quotes and/or describes someone else's opinions attributed to the quoter, usually to allege anti-Semitism.
Example: I got Coultered on my report about Nazi Germany when my teacher told me she couldn't believe I endorsed exterminating the Jews.
I bring it up because George Will is keeping this practice alive and well.
Karen Kwiatkowski is the whistleblower from the Pentagon who told the world about the goings-on in the Office of Special Plans. She wrote an article with the following line:
She's summing up others' criticisms of U.S. intentions in Iraq. It's so obvious that it's axiomatic. Will doesn't bother to note the surrounding words, though - it's simply too much, and really detracts from the point that she's an anti-Semite. Watch as he turns that into saying she had:
Pure Coulterization.
And if anyone was wondering, a similar bit is going on with Dick Clarke today, as well (minus the anti-Semitism, but I'm sure that's coming down the pike). Two days ago, he was a respected civil servant with a book coming out on Monday. Today, he's Genghis Khan with cufflinks, a man hell bent on destroying the war on terror over his demotion. A snide, conniving, deceitful, paranoid man little able to hide his own delusional fantasies about the White House, a man for whom September 11th was not a grievous day of horror but instead the result of his will and his will alone.
And I'm serious here - the day's progression of anti-Clarke comments have gone from "Bush is serious about terror" to the Dep. Asst. Sec. for the National Security saying on Hardball half an hour ago that Clarke is insane and that he thinks Osama bin Laden is sitting around chanting and controlling the minds of the Bush administration.
If Dick Clarke isn't alleged to have made secret videotapes of Donald Rumsfeld in the bathroom by this time tomorrow, it might actually be a triumph for human decency.
Trent Lott does not know when to just shut his helmet-headed ass up:
"Democracy is an evolutionary process. I would like to congratulate Mr. Putin and the delegates of the State Duma with their victory. I would like to learn how we could reach the same level of support for Republicans and President Bush for the elections in our country," said Lott.
Well, the easiest way is to just devolve your democracy into a rubber-stamp government. You know, just get your party in charge of all the branches of government and...
...Oh.
Sometimes I worry that I only address folks like the National Review (and its bizarro readers) because it's easy to do - but I think my main motivation behind it is to persuade people who might otherwise find the more palatable versions of the ideas convincing of the true weirdness behind them. For every person declaring "we have to bring freedom to the Iraqis", there's someone else saying the exact same thing with the small addendum of "...and if you disagree, you hate freedom and justice." And usually, that second person has a far wider platform from which to voice their opinions.
For instance, the madcap dash to root out liberal media bias.
The sad part is, there probably are other people besides this nut.
If anyone can think of a reason that CBS would promote CBS shows during a heavily viewed CBS-aired event, you can e-mail K-Lo with your very interesting idea.
I got this e-mail from Newsmax yesterday:
WWE superstar wrestler turned action film star Dwayne Johnson - aka 'The Rock' - thinks that might not be a bad idea.
Johnson, the Miami Herald reports, was asked if he'd like to enter politics.
"Possibly, you never know. Maybe one day. Absolutely. ... I talked to Arnold [Schwarzenegger] about that, too.
"We'll see. One day, maybe President Johnson," he laughed.
'The Rock' dipped his toe into the proverbial political pool in the year 2000, when he spoke at both parties' political conventions to try to get people to the polling booths.
But the betting is that 'The Rock' is a Republican just like Arnold.
Why?
He's a rugged individualist, believes in free enterprise -- and he's married to a Cuban-American.
Yes, you heard it right. These folks really want The Rock to be a Republican...which leads me to believe they've never actually watched a minute of professional wrestling since Bob Backlund was tearing up the mat with the cross-face chicken wing.
You can look at a preview of the Rock's acceptance speech here, with a graphic aid available for your download here. And if you're really dense, a definition and a .wav file so that you know both the proper pronunciation and meaning of "poontang".
Oh, my God, someone needs to make a t-shirt out of this line immediately:
I'll buy three.
And I swear, I think he just gets hopped up on goofballs and writes this shit. After spending several hundred words ranting like a moron about postmodernism and secularism, he says that we must stand up for "objective truth" (apparently, that's religion, a surprise to me) because of the following:
There you have it, ladies and gents: we must allow God into schools to prevent our nation from becoming a politically unstable country whose economy is dominated by foreign companies and which depends on a single export. That export being secularism, understand.
David Brooks laments the near-death of compassionate conservatism, making his first mistake - pretending it ever had the potential to exist as more than a bunch of vague rewordings of conservative policies carried out by functionaries and zealots ranging from incompetent to avaricious.
If Bush cared about forming a "center-right" coalition, he wouldn't have put AG No Boobies in charge of the Justice Department. He wouldn't have put a borderline incompetent in charge of the Department of Education. He wouldn't have chosen WASP Ghost Rider as his running mate.
Brooks refers to Bush's leadership as "bold" and "idealistic" (twice, even), but it's obvious that outside of partisan-world, it's been neither. Bush had eight months before September 11th to push a domestic agenda, to lay the framework for "compassionate conservatism", and to let all of the people he put in place begin the work that would define the domestic agenda that would in turn define his "compassion".
Guess what? They did. Bush knew who he was going to put in office, and he knew what they would do. He also knew what he was doing when he fired Paul O'Neill, Larry Lindsey and Christie Todd Whitman from their various positions (or "encouraged them to resign"). Even after September 11th changed the political focus from foreign to domestic, Bush wasn't distracted enough to forget about the centerpiece of his agenda - tax cuts, with a side order of tax cuts.
Other than the events immediately surrounding September 11th, nobody has really forced George Bush's focus anywhere. Brooks is either willfully dishonest or sorely mistaken here - compassionate conservatism is what we have before us today: large-government conservatism married with Reaganesque economic policy and numerous attempts to shame his opponents into agreeing with him...while toting out a larger number of token minority props than ever.
Compassionate conservatism isn't working, but not because Bush's attention has been diverted by the war on terror. Compassionate conservatism isn't working because it was never meant to be more than a cheap rhetorical cover to cast opposition to Bush's policies as non-compassionate. Partisans such as Brooks may have genuinely bought into the idea, but that's his bold, idealistic blunder.
Who in the hell is going to buy any of this? If I really want to own some "I Don't Want To Have Sex" gear, I can shop the clearance rack at J.C. Penney as well as anyone else can.
Tony Blankley, Jonah Goldberg, Chuck Colson, Debra Saunders and Bill Murchison all write roughly the same article using slightly different words: al-Qaeda, Saddam-lovers the lot of them, attacked Spain, and since Spain elected someone who was opposed to Aznar's Iraq policy, they gave terrorists a victory.
Now, there's only one major problem with this reading, in that it's a bunch of strung-together nonsensical partisanship masquerading as political analysis. The threads are clear - Saddam is not just the focal point of Iraqi politics, but the only point, so long as it's convenient. The only reason to act in relation to Iraq is either out of opposition to Saddam or in support of Saddam, every other issue of occupation be damned. Spanish people, devoid of any overarching national stereotype (Look...churros! Con chocolate!), are big old scaredy-cats, because Lord knows that a leader misrepresenting a terrorist attack for political gain can be overlooked if his leadership is bold.
And John Kerry is on the side of Las al-Qaedas de Madrid. Which is apparently what the Spanish are now.
I'm really afraid that we're reaching a point of critical mass where basically it's going to be considered a good idea to do anything that pisses terrorists off. The most coherent argument against the war in Iraq on the grounds of terrorism was that Saddam didn't have enough ties to global terror network for his ouster to be worthwhile in fighting it. The invasion of a Middle Eastern, predominantly Muslim country (specifically Iraq) would enrage international Islamic terrorist organizations without significantly impacting their ability to operate.
What none of these people seem to realize (besides exactly what happened in Spain last week) is that the ouster of Saddam required the invasion and occupation of Iraq - but that the two can and are viewed as separate issues. Part of the reason I'm so uncomfortable with a lot of these folks' views on Iraq and the larger war on terror is that they're unable to differentiate between phenomena. Things are either 100% related or 100% unrelated, with no ability for differentiation. It's not moral clarity, it's not purity of purpose - it's hoarding everything you can as a rhetorical bludgeon.
Does anyone think that al-Qaeda, which offered no help to repel the invasion that drove Saddam from power, apparently has had little, if any, real involvement in the insurgency in Iraq, offered no help to Saddam while he was on the run, and has made no response or statement whatsoever to any American action taken specifically against Saddam actually attacked Madrid because of their super-top-secret Saddam infatuation?
Irony is officially sharing a defibrilator with Dick Cheney, and Cheney's bogarting it:
'At the very least,' Cheney said, 'we have a right to know what he is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy.'
Yes, Dick Cheney is saying that.
David Frum, the O.G. of nonsensical and ultimately detrimental connections in the War on Terror (apparently stepping in to help all the wannabe macks in the game) is back again, and now, because of Spain, John Kerry has nothing less than Osama bin Laden's endorsement.
The logic of this is truly chilling - the barometer for how well a president is doing is terrorist attacks, and right now more = better. If someone attacks the U.S. successfully before the election, it's evidence that we need to reward the people who failed to prevent the attack. Failure to prevent terrorist attacks necessitates a reward so that the terrorists don't know that their successful mass murder affected us at all. We chose a course, and we have to stay regardless of how well it's working. God bless and goodnight.
The right is no longer concerned in the main about substantive differences between anti-terror policies. The knock against Kerry isn't that he'd be less effective than Bush at fighting terror - the knock against Kerry is that he's bin Laden's candidate because he's not Bush. Since bin Laden doesn't like Bush (or anyone, for that matter, but all of America is embodied in Bush, at least the vaseline-smeared lens parts), bin Laden necessarily likes anything that's not Bush. Is Kerry not Bush? Yes. By the power of LOGIC, bin Laden luvs Kerry.
Who knew that Glenn Reynolds' constant recitation of "they're not anti-war, they're just on the other side" would become the stock position conservatives? (Well...I think we all had our suspicions.) All hail the power of the blogosphere! And the disgustingly stupid!
Suzanne Fields writes a fairly pedestrian article on teenage abstinence, most of which isn't even worth rehashing here. Teenage pregnancy rates are down, which must of course be due conservative values sneaking past the Maginot Line of irresponsible liberal values, you know the drill.
But, in the irrepressible way that only Suzanne Fields, and the horde of the walking uncaring that make up her ideological compatriots can do, it's all about Clinton.
"The most consequential adolescent act in American history during the past half century," he writes, was the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. It lacked not only the sophistication of an adult affair, accompanied by wine and roses, but grooved on pizza with groping beneath the desk. "No matter what one's politics, one has to admit that our great national scandal was pure high school." It was adolescent sex as adult farce.
Well, I'd argue that Epstein's idea is more adolescent and farcical than Clinton's actual affair. In fact the entire theory is almost pre-adolescent - that hyper-moralizing "gotcha"-ism you findin obnoxious little 11-year-olds where, so long as you're not them, any transgression you make is immediately the worst and most heinous crime a person can commit. Not because it's wrong, but because there's a personal material gain to be made from having that to hang over someone's head.
"Oooooh...you had sex in the Oval Offiiiiiiiice...I'm gonna tell mooooooooom!"
"Okay, asscrack - how much do you want, and when?"
"I want...a veto on the assault weapons bill going through the Senate."
The moralizing is imbued with less maturity than the act itself, and we find ourselves in a situation where the total disproportionality of the response to the problem is worse than the problem itself. And it's been brought up before as well - with Clinton as a role model, teenage pregnancy rates went down. Amazing how kids today actually have the ability to differentiate between themselves and the things on TV. It's almost like they have...brains.
Sweet, delicious brains...oh, I'm sorry, that was the Coulter in me talking.
Michael D. Capaldi has the journalistic equivalent of a fine meal that gives you food poisoning. It starts well, but ends up so very bad:
Of course you are. If we sent a team of lawyers through your files for a week, we could prove it.
One sign of a legal system in decline is that it makes everyone a criminal. Laws that make no practical sense. Laws no one ever heard of. Laws that punish ordinary behavior. In so many of the ways in which it touches your life, American law is ridiculous, oppressive or corrupt.
So we agree up till now. Ready for the food poisoning?
America's laws once worked and had our respect. It can happen again.
So kids, listen to Mr. T when he says "I pity da fool who thinks small government is the answer to all his problems!" It's some of the best advice you're likely to get.
Andy Sullivan, with his characteristic gravity and war-to-end-all-wars rhetoric, writes:
It looks like it might have been a bit of a mistake to let Osama bin Laden spend a couple of years cooling his heels in Pakistan while we conducting an unrelated war in Iraq. That, I think, would be seeing clearly.
Now it's back to Al-Qaeda. Until it isn't, again.
The Dynamic Duke of Dickdom has a new children's book due out this fall, The O'Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide For American Youth.
Every so often we here at Pandagon get review copies of books, and I've managed to get my hands on a very early draft of O'Reilly's book. Below are O'Reilly's Ten Kidmandments, straight from the horse's mouth:
9. Don't play the violent videogames or listen to MTV. Instead, expand your minds: read Laura Ingraham's Shut Up And Sing, Ann Coulter's Treason, Sean Hannity's This Book Is About Me, Sean Hannity, Who This Book Is About. There are people out to get you. Everywhere. They could be your neighbors. They could be...no, they *are* your teachers. Look towards folks like me, because we aren't motivated by the desire to ruin kids' minds like all that crap.
8. The Factor was the first show, the first journalistic outlet, to ever catch Pikachu. Not NBC. Not ABC, not Dan Rather. Us. And we caught him 4 separate times, more than anyone else.
7. Don't ever take anything from Hillary Clinton unless you have it on tape and her mask is off. Otherwise, you can't prove that she corrupted you.
6. Stay away from drugs. If you need a hit of something, get it from your church or a respected figure like me or other conservative radio hosts. And make sure that hit is of the best drug of all time, self-respect, and respect for your country. Get high on that.
5. If you're African-American, nobody but you is responsible for your plight. I don't care what your little socialistic teachers or parents say to you, nobody owes you anything because you're black. Don't listen to the rappers and the so-called "civil rights leaders" about that, because they're wrong. Nobody in the black community is going to tell you anything you need to know about being black. But I will.
4. Always be honest about who you are and where you came from, just like we do in the No Spin Zone.
3. Create your own No Spin Zone. Don't take anyone's word about anything if you're sure about your own opinion. You think anyone knows better than you? When I was a kid, I didn't trust my teachers, or what they said - you don't got nothin' but the brain on your own head, your fists, and your feet. That's all I had, and look where I am.
2. Believe in God. Barring that, believe in George W. Bush, because he's a godly man with nice teeth and strong calves.
1. Whatever you do, don't take bad advice just because someone seems to be have the trappings of authority, or because other people believe in them. Think for yourself. When you get older read my other books, The No Spin Zone, The O'Reilly Factor, and Who's Looking Out For You. Millions have benefitted from them, and so will you, trust me - you'll see how to be independent-minded, just the way I am.
Seems like great stuff, eh?
It occurred to me last night that the people who feel they need assault weapons in order to rise against the government some day are the same people who are absolutely intent on giving the Pentagon as much money for advanced weaponry as they possibly can. It's really quite strange. If I felt like armed revolt against the Government was a possibility, I wouldn't be trying to cut their Medicare budget, I'd be trying to arrange things in such a way that me and my merry band of Montanans could stand some sort of a chance. But no. They want to keep assault weapons so they can win the fight while simultaneously giving the Army computer guided missile systems that will keep them out of range from our puny guns. They want handguns to protect themselves yet they are adamant on allowing tactical nuke onto battlefields.
It's as if they've got political opinion and political opinion 2 and never shall the twain meet, much less affect each other.
When you lie in the first three words of your magnum opus against John Kerry, you don't set the best precedent. Mickey Kaus:
This is already out there, and then we go on to the normal Kausian refrain: deep-seated character issues. Can Kerry exemplify the qualities whose definition and standards are solely constructed by Kaus to limit Kerry's appeal and competence as a candidate?
Can I eat two dozen donuts a day and maintain my svelte, athletic figure?
The most telling thing about Kaus is that he's disappointed because Kerry didn't go through with a series of anti-affirmative action speeches. Not even because of the policy reversal - but because Kerry could have made a name for himself by being a Democrat who criticized other Democrats...but didn't.
Is this the hidden key to Kaus' pathology? Did he hope, way back in 1992, that John Kerry would be the national template for his ideology? Was he disappointed, and it turned into this?
Others, bizarrely, haven't cemented their entire career around an annoying schtick focusing on talking to a editorial manifestation of their own psyche. Who the fuck do they think they are?
If only I was as good at snappy comebacks as Michael Graham...I'd make a completely irrelevant and borderline offensive comparison between two groups I don't like.
Something I've noticed is that this sort of anti-rich sentiment tends to bubble up a lot more on the right than the left. The monied are, to London, a vulgar and contemptuous set so taken with its own undeserved gifts that its largesse is ultimately wasted on itself.
London, a conservative, actually embodies the paradoxical angry elite stereotype of Democrats - bitterly resentful of the rich while simultaneously longing for a rich, aristocratic elite to properly handle the burdens and responsibilities of money, and take it away from those garish commoners.
Of course, London also likes tax cuts, so he's a populist's populist.
Does anyone else think that Mickey Kaus is rather gingerly toeing the line between obsession and paranoia?
Our ever-less-sane hero bravely unveils the thuggery behind the Kerry campaign, the, ah, not-really-threatish-style-type statements coming from advisers, many of whom talk about getting other candidates out of the race (shock!), responding to dirty campaigning by Republicans quickly and forcefully, unlike Dukakis (awe!), and talking down Edwards because he's only won one state (Iraqi reconstruction!).
You can virtually hear the malice dripping down their bared fangs, ready to slash the tires and break the kneecaps of everyone who dares go against them. This isn't politics - it's the mafia. Granted, a shitty, genteel, verbose mafia that responds through political ads and mildly uplifting speeches replete with implorations to surf the internet and donate money...but a mafia nonetheless!
Tomorrow's Kausfiles: How John Kerry Kidnapped The Lindbergh Baby...And Aborted It.
The firmness behind The Passion.
I found this article really disappointing, because it starts off so strong, talking about the "massive debut" of the firmness, talks about sitting in front of Diane Sawyer as it looks like she's sucking on that firmness, just like everyone in the liberal media should...and then it goes on to talk about how The Passion is some dumb movie about Jesus, and how everyone's afraid of that.
What's funny about all of this is that for all the furor over the film, its violence, its anti-Semitism, etc., I've yet to see a single attack by any critic of the film on Christianity, the story of Christ, the fundaments of the Judeo-Christian narrative...anything.
You bitch and you bitch and you bitch, and other people bitch in return, and the media covers the bitchfest, all of which is proof that the media is unsympathetic to your bitching and is actually doing all of the real bitching.
See the massive firmness, next Wednesday...if you think you can handle it. It's graphic.
The only question is, who's going to be Hannity, and who's going to be Colmes?
What is a "Hannity-style romance", exactly? Wouldn't it just be really angry masturbation with someone else watching on and weakly challenging your technique as you scream at them?
David Frum does one of those hackjob political columns that I love, if only because you can almost see the flop sweat on his brow as he tries to work in every slur and meta-scandal he can find.
And when you break that, will you finally realize that you can't take it with you into the shower?
Isn't it curious how after a story like this turns out to be nothing, there's still at least one hack behind the curve, desperately yanking it along like their little red wagon with a wheel fallen off. It's kind of sad, in that "lost childhood" sense.
P stands for "Please, bitch." R stands for "Really, this is lame." E stands for "Every time this gets brought up, I feel a piece of me die." N stands for "Now, remember what happens when you assume?" U stands for "Under everything else, you really have no idea what you're talking about." P stands for "Probably still think Clinton ran drugs out of Mena." T stands for "Thank you for bringing this up, because I was looking for something easy to bat out of the park." I stands for "Intelligent people realize that you can't make an iBook work by banging it with a meat hammer." A stands for "A few days ago, this column's bite might have had teeth, but right now you're gumming more than the Perry Mason Fan Club at Shady Pines Rest Home." L stands for "Look, I think I've embarassed you enough, which is why I'm going to tell you that your wife's book was awful."
What does that spell? David Frum, you sound like a jackass. Oh, and PRENUPTIAL.
Rush Limbaugh was also speculating a couple of days ago that Ding-Dongs would replace the Eucharist in Catholic ceremonies. This is why we dont trust Rush Limbaugh, kids.
You know, I have to wonder what it was that Bill and Hillary did to replace the Illuminati, the International Jewish Conspiracy, and the Screen Actors' Guild in the paranoia-flavored conspiracy theories of right-wingers. Next up, when Kerry wins in November, it's actually a secret conspiracy by the Clintons to get Bill appointed Speaker of the House after they rig a series of House elections to gain Democratic control of the Congress.
Better question: is the rumor actually TRUE? Might you have asked that before you wrote this column? Is your common sense also in at the shop after several crashes?
Ladies and gentleman, the paranoiac's new conspiracy focus: Wes Clark's kid. The new top-secret focus of the Democratic Party is actually an unholy alliance between the Clark and Clinton families wherein Wes Jr. and Chelsea get married, take the presidency, give it to the spore people of Zargon-18, who's actually a communist plant of Fidel Castro and hardliner elements in the U.S.S.R. to destroy capitalism and Christianity.
Um...nope. Both pretty damned stupid.
This theory is not as clever as Rush’s. But it may come closer to the sad, squalid truth.
Wouldn't it be funny if David Frum was actually a performance piece by Mike Myers that nobody in the Republican Party figured out? The theory's not as clever as, say, a 7th Heaven script, but it may come closer to making sense than anything Frum has himself said in the article.
From the Drugman himself, Rush Limbaugh (just on his show): the leak to Drudge about Kerry has Bill and Hillary Clinton written all over it.
That's what I love about this whole thing - everyone's conspiracy is responsible for everyone else's conspiracy, and all we can really be sure of is that someone, somewhere, did something, unless they didn't and Karl Rove made the whole thing up.
I think it's time for an Uggabugga chart detailing who's accused whom of what.
As far as I can tell, Clark, the puppet of the Clintons, unleashed the scandal about Kerry, who he then endorsed in open defiance of Dean and Edwards, the former of whom is staying in the race because he also knew about this scandal. There's a mysterious friend shopping around this rumor, and Chris Lehane has been pushing it, as revealed by MSNBC. Drudge says several media sources are investigating it, even though many say they aren't, according to Editor & Publisher. Kerry, on Imus this morning, said that he did not have an affair with the AP reporter, erroneously referred to as an intern to bring up comparisons with Monica Lewinsky, but conservative news sources are loath to believe his denial. The reporter's parents deny any knowledge of the affair, although they do claim a personal dislike of Senator Kerry, who is married to Teresa Heinz-Kerry, formerly married to Sen. John Heinz. Drudge claims the reporter "fled" after being approached by a "top news producer", although it's not clear if the woman, who worked for the Associated Press, was approached by the news producer because of this story, or because she did many stories on health insurance and AIDS, and Africa has an AIDS epidemic.
How does one excoriate the NAACP for giving a favorable response to an alleged child rapist while simultaneously serving as a public face for the defense of another one?
(Second link via Roger Ailes.)
This conservative bake-sale idea is spreading, and it seems like the only thing it's done is provoke discussion over whether or not the bake sales are good ideas, not affirmative action.
Other than vastly oversimplifying the issue, it also brings up an issue about affirmative action that I've heard bandied about by opponents - that affirmative action causes those who disagree with it to believe that others are racially inferior. In general (and this may just be my knee-jerk liberalism talking here), when anything leads you to presume racially-based inferiority, that's the problem of the assumer, not the person being assumed upon.
These bake sales are the epitome of the bad protest politics I saw all the time in college, and their failure has less to do with the fact that colleges are hostile to conservatism than the fact that they do exactly what the protest shouldn't - leave people talking about the protest itself rather than the issues raised. It reminds me of nothing so much as a protest we had at Swarthmore right before the Iraq War - Stand Against The War.
The entire idea was to stand up throughout classes in protest of the war against Iraq. Now, how a bunch of college students standing around in their classrooms sends a message to anyone but the students and professors that they opposed the war (which is a remarkably insular goal in and of itself), I don't know. In much the same way that the right has adopted the PC mantle that it maligned the campus left for lo these many years, they're picking up the exact same brand of reactionary, attention-grabbing campus politics that has thrilled, chilled, and mildly annoyed many of us.
Bill O'Reilly apologizes. For real.
The question now is whether or not this translates into him being an asshole to defenders of the war, or if he takes the predictable step and never, ever mentions this again.
Jonah Goldberg slams Democratic concerns over due process, which isn't nearly as important as what's discovered through violations thereof:
Anyway, it always seemed to me that an intellectually honest liberal could be outraged at both the leak and the content of the leak. But to be outraged solely at the former and not at all at the latter is a classic sign of rank partisanship.
Actually, we do have this system of codified laws and foundational ethics that promise due process to all people accused of a crime. It is, in fact, what makes our legal system what it is. Jonah manages to pick the one example that doesn't apply to this situation - parents looking around their child's room (and yes, there is even a problem with that, to some extent). The legal relationship between parent and child has nothing whatsoever to do with this memo situation. Republican staffers accessed Democratic servers in potential violation of federal law, and did so repeatedly.
Jonah's position is that any violation of the law and/or basic rights is permissible as long as you find out that someone is doing something bad. Just how little respect is this for the Constitution? Due process was, after all, enumerated specifically in the Fifth Amendment by the Founding Fathers. It's not some random effluvial concept that Democrats invented to divert attention from political scandals - it's one of the foundation ethics of the United States of America.
This is an idiotic "test" of how nonpartisan Jonah's opposition is. Democrats consulted groups representing important constituencies regarding important decisions they were making. I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about a Republican consulting a conservative activist group with regards to legislative actions, to be honest. Jonah's position seems to be that laws are less important than not setting off his Spidey-Sense of Rank Partisanship. If he wants to have that position, fine, but I certainly hope he never gets called up for jury duty.
Dennis Prager, who, in the past, created a fake interview with Jimmy Carter about Lord of the Rings that so fooled Jonah Goldberg her was ready to get straight Mordor on the Georgian's peanut-candy ass, is back with another fake interview - this time with Massachusetts Supreme Court Justices.
It may seem real, but it is not.
A: Frankly, we couldn't care less how so-called "higher civilizations" have defined marriage. They were all wrong.
I'm not sure if this is a huge dis to Canada, or what. And is it just me, or does this "higher civilization" bit sound like every sniffling stereotypical European/American anthropologist in every stereotypical noble third-world country in every bad movie about white people facing culture shock...ever?
A: Because liberals value feelings, not wisdom. And our feelings led us to the decision to force Massachusetts to redefine marriage.
"How dare you go against the laws of the elders? They have told us of the fire gods, and the fire gods have protected us! You bring...devil magic!"
I suppose if liberals value feelings, conservatives value talking to people who aren't there as if it's a debate they can win?
A: That what the world needs is more love.
Q: But no one has challenged anyone's right to love anyone. You didn't rule on love, you ruled on the definition of marriage.
A: Marriage is an expression of love.
At this point, the entire Massachusetts Supreme Court got up and had a massive orgy to the haunting melodies of Enya mixed with a looping tape of Adolf Hitler's speech to the crowd at the Berlin Olympics. When they got back, disheveled and wearing underwear that may or may not belong to them, their only remark was, "Damn, that felt good."
A: We chose not to address that issue in our verdict.
Q: What about an adult brother and sister who love each other and want to get married?
A: We chose not to address that issue in our verdict.
"...Because it's almost totally irrelevant. And why is it that you think of freakier shit in your Brooks Brothers pleated slacks than we do when we legalize "immoral" gay marriage?
"Do you like Enya?"
A: What do children have to do with our decision?
Q: It will now be far easier for children to be adopted by same-sex couples. This means that in the case of two married men, children will be deprived of a mother from birth and forever; and in the marriage of two women, children will be deprived of a father from birth and forever.
A: We do not believe that a child is better off with a mother and a father. All a child is needs love.
"And since we're also complete fucking morons, and apparently made our way to the highest judicial bench in the state of Massachusetts through a series of contrived, semi-humorous occurences and strategic sexual dalliances, we're going to see what happens if you dip this Snickers bar in Drano and rub your eyes with it."
A: As we said, all a child needs is love. And we have compassion for gays.
"GODDAMN, that hurt! Hey, let's see what happens when we do it with liquid margarine..."
A: We don't trust the American people. Half of them vote Republican, vast numbers believe in the Bible, even many Democrats are not as enlightened as we are, and most Americans do not have our compassion for gays.
"Also, at least one of those Americans is you, and if we left it up to you, you'd keep the polling station open until three in the morning having an imaginary conversation with Russell Crowe's character from Master and Commander about how pirates are like terrorists, and we'd never get the vote counted."
A: When you are more enlightened and more compassionate than others, you recognize the limitations of democracy, and you make the world better in any way you can.
"In addition, Nazi Supermen are your superiors. We heard that somewhere, and it sounded awesome."
A: No question about it. We went to law school, and we have compassion for gays.
"Is that shirt a poly/cotton blend? HEATHEN! HERETIC! JESUS SHIT, WE LIKE YELLING! CORN!"
A: Even if it did, we would still have compassion for gays.
"We have officially crossed the line from really stupid to transcendentally stupid. Next up is ethereally stupid, where we say that we legalized gay and lesbian marriage because of brainwaves we received from the trisexual satyrs of Gupnar-8."
A: No, we would not say those things. But we have compassion for gays.
"Hey, could you also call us secretly really good athletes and cooks? I mean, as long as we're closet-uncomfortable with homosexuality, we might as well get dates out of the whole thing. And we only go out as a whole, so we need a man and/or woman who is full of love. And, eventually, us. Just saying."
A: Now you know how important compassion is to us liberals.
"Let's go turn on our 60-inch plasma screen TVs and make every child in our neighborhood watch The L-Word with us. Pam Grier is still sooooo hot.
"We hate families! We're here all week, folks. You're beautiful. Beautiful."
I'm not one to say that critiques of politicians by their respective partisans are more powerful than other critiques, but it sure as hell is amusing to watch Sully shake off the cobwebs and go a couple of rounds with the Bush/Russert interview yesterday.
"Hold up...you mean, he's just saying shit to make himself seem right with no regard for the truth whatsoever?"
He's been doing this since he first figured out the phrase "tax cut", Andy. IF there's anything Bush said that was true yesterday, it's that he doesn't change. Sure, he may change a rationale here and there, but if he cares at all about it, he will do what he is going to do regardless of how stupid or bad for the country it is.
Welcome to the party. Chips and salsa are over on the dining room table.
If you own a gun, and if you have ammunition for it, then according to the media elite, you only own it to sodimize your cousin/lover with the barrel in a reenactment of your own childhood abuse.
If you've ever owned a flag without burning it, the Manhattan limousine liberals who dictate our so-called public discourse think you're some sort of fascist overlord of their pathetic socialist ideal of reality, and want to see you dead.
If you're a carbon-based lifeform, the silicon-based alien lifeforms that run NBC along with the self-loathing Jews in control of the rest of the media want to harvest your precious bodily fluids for the army of humanoid clones they want to unleash on an unsuspecting populace to kill off any objection to a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Their biased bunk is more obvious than Janet Reno subbing in an all boy Japanese middle school wearing a day glow unitard. KY jelly is less transparent than Dan Rather’s ideological foundations.
They are the thrusting vibrator of liberal incompetence, indelicately exploring the nether regions of America's tolerance zone, trying to hit the G-spot and finding only the No-spot, until the time comes when we can no longer bear their unskilled touch. It is that time, and we must rise up against them, forcing them to sleep on the couch of America's rent-controlled apartment, not letting them into the chaste, mildly freaky bedroom of our hopes and dreams until they take that "How To Love Your Lover" class down at the Y that we've been reminding them of for months now.
One of these paragraphs isn't made up.
Psst...don't tell Jonah that Lynda Carter thinks star-spangled granny panties aren't the height of fashion.
First of all, his name is Patrick Stewart. Second of all, Star Trek revolved around one major philosophy: secularistic utopianism. In fact, a lot of Star Trek focused by and large on the idea that a technologically advanced humanity had unified as it headed into space, and the great conflicts came between interstellar races (more accurately species) governed by planetary single-system governments and/or coexisting multilateral factions.
In fact, if you look at most of the conflicts on Star Trek, they come from the fact that various systems of governance and/or governing attitudes are fundamentally flawed, usually in terms of aggression (Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians) or avarice (Ferengi). Humans/the Federation were the de facto lawkeepers of the universe because they either didn't have or had overcome the fundamental flaws that governed other species' behavior.
I guess the question is, did Jonah watch Star Trek? Or learn how to spell "weasel"? One 's', my man.
While still in the midst of the whole corpse-mutilation saga (I swear, sometimes the Corner is eerily reminiscent of what would happen if you hotboxed AEI), Tim Graham refers to Janet Jackson's bare breast as one of "the seediest corners of the adult world". In a world where the three biggest non-political stories are a rape trial, a pedophilia trial, and a murder trial with wall-to-wall coverage, a naked boobie is the seediest thing "the adult world" has to offer.
Meanwhile, John Derbyshire is giggling over exploded whales and Conquerors. I swear to God, I could not make this up if I tried.
How come we never do anything fun like talk about all the dead people we'd like to hang? Come on! We all must have some bizarre and overwrought personal pathologies that will make themselves well known as we discuss corpse desecration.
It's what all the cool kids are doing...
The hack-in-training over at "Lying Liar" seeks to take down Al Franken (again), this time by proving that Brit Hume didn't say what Al Franken says he said by quoting Hume saying what Franken says he said. Let's go to the tape:
“Statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California.”
LIE!
Obviously, we're going to encounter a bold refutation of this statement. It's in caps!
“Statistically speaking, U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California which is roughly the same geographical size.”
See? Franken totally left out the geographical size thing. Why does this guy say that Franken is wrong? Because this totally erroneous statement was the premise of a larger point. And the larger point was that because California seemingly suffers more proportional deaths than Iraq (blatantly untrue), that the liberal media is mistaken in focusing on the deaths in Iraq.
Of course, when the basic premise of your argument is factually invalid...that doesn't augur well for the argument itself.
I honestly do love this guy. It's an endless cornucopia of awfulness.
The Oxyconsecration of the Pharmaceutical Jesus will deliver us unto eternal glory!
I myself have been shaken on at least three occasions. Although two of those might have been gas, I'm not sure.
At this point, we will do almost anything to have a single sentence you write make sense.
When did Brent Spiner become a Limbaugh fan?
"Captain, I believe that this fat spliff has a 72.81% chance of getting us straight blazed. And this tax cut has a 99.2% chance of helping America's families. Now pass the doobie. My android form needs the bomb-ass grass, son."
Federal prosecutors are the Pharisees of our time. And upon viewing this spectacle, the Republican Pope, Ronald Reagan, said, "It is as it was." Nancy Reagan later added that Peggy Noonan should really stop breaking into the Reagan ranch and pretending that Ronnie is talking to her.
By the way, this is when it gets creepy.
Jimmy Carter: fought for human rights the world over. Rush Limbaugh: busily working on a parody of the South Carolina primaries set to the tune of "Brown Sugar". Who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize? Too close to call.
That's a new one for drug addiction. It's a-okay as long as you rationalize your addiction through your physical need for a substance in order to live a normal life. That's an incredible rarity among drug addicts, and should be fostered, even applauded. As should the drive to replace the bald eagle as America's symbol with a picture of my ass.
Officially the weirdest paragraph a movement conservative has ever written.
I'm comforted by the fact that hero worship is dead and buried among American conservatives, who pride themselves on their rationality and-
-Okay, that just stepped over the line from religious fervor to a dom/sub relationship. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'm all about drug rehabilitation and detox rather than imprisonment for non-violent drug offenders. But I'm amazed at the fact that anti-drug conservatives have turned addiction into something to be lionized, all because Rush Limbuagh is on their side.
Tomorrow: Donovan McNabb, the Prince of Darkness. Of course, he'd only be an Advisor of Darkness if the liberal media didn't have an agenda to promote a black agent of evil.
Ben Shapiro, showing that the editorial focus of young conservatism is as sharp and relevant as that newfangled mortar and pestle that the Shapiro household picked up, proves conclusively that he's willing to lie, poorly, for Bill O'Reilly.
Dude. You can get O'Reilly's book for a dollar. Talking about "giveaways" when your book is selling for the princely sum of one American greenback is a bit of the pot and kettle phenomenon, innit?
O'Reilly fired back by quoting Nielsen vice president of sales and services Jim King, who said Nielsen had put Drudge on notice regarding his unlicensed use of BookScan numbers. O'Reilly wrote this on his Web site: "So let's sum it up, folks: The 'irrefutable source' that Drudge cited in bashing Bill ... is telling Drudge: 1) It's not irrefutable; 2) it undercounts book sales by as much as 35 percent; 3) don't publish the list on your site again."
O'Reilly doesn't contradict the numbers (which have O'Reilly being outsold by several hundred thousand copies), he's still being routinely outsold by Franken...and he's a huge liar.
I dealt with this a long time ago, but to be a successful political commentator and say this is like Shaquille O'Neal saying that it's wrong for people to make money playing professional sports.
Shapiro finishes laying out the case, citing such unimpeachable sources as The American Prowler, and Alotta O'Reilly, Bill's press secretary. Something that I've never understood about Townhall is that it tends to attract people who write on small-bore issues better suited for weblogs. And it also attracts people who couldn't even run interesting weblogs.
By the way, I saw Savage Nation on the remainder table at a Waldenbooks a few days ago. You know, where Living History was supposed to be back in July.
The Corner is officially behind Joe Lieberman.
Joementum: bringing back the Democratic wing of the Republican Party.
I would like one argument from a Democratic Lieberman supporter that he would actually be a good candidate for the Democratic Party, and not just for the group of pro-war, socially moderate/liberal Democrats who've decided to distance themselves from the rest of the party in a fit of moral pique.
I'd also like a Flash animation of Joe Lieberman dancing to Hey, Ya with a cartoon sherriff's hat on his head. I don't know why. I just think it would be funny.
Grover Norquist, top Bush adviser, is not only not retracting his comparisons of Democrats to Nazis, but is taking it further.
Yes, since it's the Right.
No, really?
Reasonable: taxing inheritance is akin to the murder of nearly 20 million people. Reasonable: saying that the Left are both Nazis and Communists, despite the two ideologies being diametrically opposed to one another. Unreasonable: refusing to publish two submitted Bush=Hitler ads and the apologizing for it.
Norquist, of course, is himself a pocket Stalinist who admires the methodology of the Communist dictator. But that's compeletely different.
Question: is there an honest account of Patricia Mendoza's saga anywhere?
All I can find of it are the standard inconsistent Clinton-era conspiracy theories reported by NewsMax and WorldNutDaily. "She was removed by the Secret Service!" "She was audited...twice!" "Her cat was staple-gunned to her child, who was then hot-glued to their front door...which was then imprisoned!"
National Review prints a review of John Stossel's book, Give Me A Break: How I Stopped Caring About Shit Because 20/20 Wouldn't Fire Me If I Kidnapped And Ate Hugh Downs.
Now, I don't particularly care about the review or the book, which, if you replaced references to his "libertarianism" with references to him being an ex-CBS reporter, would simply be a rewrite of Bernie Goldberg's Bias.
But I fail to understand why anyone takes Stossel seriously. For the past half-decade (at the least), he's only done three types of stories:
1.) I'm A Consumer Advocate, But A Bad, Petty One
The last time I saw Stossel pull this one out of the mothballs, he was revealing to us a massive scandal of the liberal Hollywood machine: sometimes, they use good reviews from lesser-known sources in their advertising, because big names didn't like the movie. And they label where the quotes came from!!!
Truly hard-hitting stuff for the embattled consumer.
2.) Stuff Costs Money, And It's Likely Your Fault, Or The Government's, Or Liberal Advocacy Groups'
The vast majority of his forgettable oeurve: there's something that costs more money than it should! You, as the consumer, need to do something to pull this onerous burden off of business! By the way, any critique of anything Stossel is talking about causes cancer. No, seriously. It's like magic. You believe in global warming, organic foods, or mercury consumption causing cancer...and you get cancer!
(FlipYrWhig points out that this is a part of a larger Stosselization of public issues - everything is actually the problem of the people complaining about it. Unfortunately, that's the constant undertone of modern conservatism, so it almost gets lost in the shuffle. Stossel, however, is its modern-day master.)
3.) Baby, I Don't Know What I'm Talking About
This is when Stossel truly shines. The main reason the media is so biased against John Stossel is that most of them are smarter than he is (except, perhaps, 20/20's producer). Stossel is fairly notorious for repeating anything that proves his point, even if it's not factual. FAIR's got a comprehensive archive of Stossel's recent screw-ups, most of which tend to come when he's talking or moving or somehow participating in an activity which could communicate to a viewer or listener any information whatsoever.
Other than those small problems, he's got more integrity than any reporter on TV.
When the SCLM movement gets a beacon like Stossel on its side, it's time for you to figure out that you can watch one of the two remaining shows on broadcast television each Friday night - Dateline NBC (for the newsmagazine fix) or Law & Order: Spinoff Unit (for your fix of murder, rape, or Vince D'Onofrio, depending on what's being rerun).
Matt Yglesias has a great find. They're conservatives. They're cool. They're conservacool! Like William Buckley Jr., only with more pimping. And in one sentence, you're about to hear The National Review tell you all you need to know about how cool they are:
You know, for how much he appears to dislike Dean, I think Byron York would really get along with him. In his office, Dean is a compulsive recycler, making sure that all the paper and other assorted materials are properly sorted into recycling bins. In his columns, York is also a compulsive recycler, making sure that his columns are full of debunked slurs, properly sorted out from anything resembling context or honesty.
York for Dean? Probably not.
I'm hard-pressed to figure out why a journal which typically publishes annoying, wrongheaded political analysis hired Jennifer Graham to be James Lileks without the political insight.
You see, Jennifer Graham has a Typical American Problem - the Christmas tree is still up, nearly a month later. Oh, isn't that a delectable, trite anecdote that we hear every Christmas like a bad stand-up routine about drinking too much eggnog.
Except that Jennifer Graham, relating her Average Everyday Life to us, is a little bit different:
Mm-kay.
By the way, is anyone surprised that on Martin Luther King's 75th birthday, National Review finds that dead Christmas trees and Tim Graham's reactions to low-carb controversies are the most fitting reminders of it that anyone can see fit to publish? Granted, there's still room in the day. But they seem to have put up today's issue already without comment.
Sigh.
I'm trying to figure out how this article doesn't argue that the entire concept of the nation-state is false...and failing.
To paraphrase a wee bit: the Bush Republicans are drunk-ass mothers, and real conservatives just aren't gonna take it!
"The Republican Congress is spending at twice the rate as under Bill Clinton, and President Bush has yet to issue a single veto," Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Coalitions for America, said at a news briefing with the other five leaders. "I complained about profligate spending during the Clinton years but never thought I'd have to do so with a Republican in the White House and Republicans controlling the Congress."
Warning of adverse consequences in the November elections, the leaders said the Senate must reject the latest House-passed omnibus spending bill or Mr. Bush should veto the measure.
Is the conservative coalition fracturing? Is the binge over? Will George W. Bush have to find political God to stop him from his fiscal alcoholism? Will he be really pissed when he finds out that the savior looks a lot like a certain red-nosed Arkansan adulterer?
The only real problem is that these people have nowhere to go. They'll burn their Bibles before they vote Democratic, and the closest thing they have to a viable secondary candidate will be whoever the Libertarians run. They are, however, threatening not to vote, which is about the strongest statement they can make, however unlikely it is.
Right now, I'm just cheering "Go Speed Weyrich Gooooo!"
Dennis Miller is back, and as not-funny as ever.
Since we've already gone over the MoveOn thing ad nauseum, and since Hitler comparisons are de rigeur on the left and the right these days, I'll contact the four people who are actually excited about Miller's new show and demonstrate his utter irrelevance to them.
Oh, wait. Job done.
I understand that Miller has increasingly hidden behind ever-more esoteric and irrelevant humor to mask the fact that he has less and less to say...but a Rod Steiger joke is far, far on the other side of the "witty, urbane reference" line. I have never seen another person try as hard as Dennis Miller does to prove that they're intelligent. Which is why the subsequent failure seems to be so spectacular.
He goes on to explain his conversion to conservatism, which seems to be that he's really simple-minded and afraid, which renders him summarily incapable of discussing national security outside of the mindset of "the guy who says he's going to blow more shit up is great for me", which puts him firmly in line with one of Gary Busey's manic phases.
A-cha-cha-cha. And Rod Steiger says hi.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds says that the interview should be required reading for Democratic Party strategists. Yes. Remind people that Miller is a Republican now. That will secure 20 million Monday Night Football viewers for the Democrats immediately.
By the way, did you know that the Democrats becoming Bush phenomenon is a tide that's sweeping America? As many as one has-been comedian, one Democratic Senator who's consistently voted more Republican than most of the Republican caucus, and some bloggers! The Democratic Party needs to kowtow to these people immediately, taking up their bold new platform of "terrorists are bad and we need somebody who's not afraid to say that in a way that makes my tummy feel warm" and "who gives a fuck-all about the rest of it?"
Question: t'weren't George Dubya the first "CEO President"? And t'weren't Paul O'Neill deputy director of the OBM from 1974-1977? And t'werent the Office of Budget & Management a government position, what with the politics and whatnot?
By the way, if any conservatives use that title, I get royalties.
National Review is pimping a Bill Bennett-penned college guide that, to look at the NRO review, looks like a well-balanced, incisive look at the academic climate of many top-tier schools. The star quote, however, is from Thomas "Kidney Pie" Sowell...which leads one to wonder if this isn't all that it's cracked up to be?
Now, one of the main complaints of the anti-academic right is that college campuses are overrun with incredibly biased liberals. Why, then, is the answer to write a book decrying the liberalism of the campuses from an incredibly biased conservative perspective?
Does it make any sense to try and find out how "liberal" a campus is by reading the opinions of conservative ideologues in the matter? Now, it might tell similar ideologue parents (or students) how they'll perceive the campus, so in that sense it might serve a very narrow clientele. But as a legitimate tool measuring the political climate of a campus, it's beyond useless.
I don't ask PETA about the quality of cafeteria food, and I don't ask Bill Bennett about the political climates of colleges and universities - at least, if I want a serious answer.
Robert Novak, aider and abettor of a federal crime, has also gotten into the Native American-insulting bidness.
Of course, this isn't particularly novel for him, either. Maybe he could wave a few flags with the white South, who knows?
Small question for the Daily Disher.
How can Andrew Sullivan justify not only receiving money from, but also helping to promote, the newspaper arm of an insane cultist who said the following?
What sort of cognitive dissonance must it take to receive a paycheck from someone who wants to see you die in a Stalinist purge?
Add Howard Ahmanson, Jr. to the list of conservative sugar daddies. (Salon, so get the Day Pass.)
Yet few Americans have heard of Ahmanson -- and that's the way he likes it. Unlike Scaife, Ahmanson donates cash either out of his own pocket or through his unincorporated corporate entity, Fieldstead and Co., to avoid having to report the names of his grantees to the IRS.
It's hard to quote any more than that, if only because the man's dipped his finger in every pie from Anglican schisms to the recall of Gray Davis to R.J. Rushdoony's Christianist Chalcedon Foundation. He's a major player, and scary if only because he's probably a bigger political player than George Soros will ever be - and far less open about it.
When are we going to look at the fact that major portions of the right are not only bankrolled by multi-millionaires and billionaires, but are bankrolled by people who want to see a fundamental change in America away from its Constitutional roots. Episcopalians alone should be outraged at this man's influence on their church.
Atrios shows us a truly repellent article from NRO that basically says feminism ruined sex by allowing those involved to say "no" to sex even after they've gone to the hotel room!
Let's hope none of these guys are ever doctors, particularly for elective surgeries. A patient is on the table screaming they don't want an operation, and their argument is, "You already came in the hospital, so you must want it. Just suck down the happy gas..."
Why do I get the feeling that the author of this trash has never met an actual rape victim?
Jonah Goldberg believed Dennis Prager's inane "news item" about Jimmy Carter and Lord of the Rings. I don't know...do you think that the "Prager News Service" is real? Or that there's a "Norwegian Society for Universal Neutrality"?
Something I didn't notice - the obvious "parody" (I use the word loosely, as it's actually just a series of incoherent babbles about Lord of the Rings) ends with this line:
Fictional but not false? Is that like "employed by the National Review but honest"?
If you want to see someone "fact-check" Al Franken's book using nothing but factually bankrupt conservative books, innuendo, and terrible logic, look no further than FrankenLies.com.
And as a special insult, he says that blogs are the equivalent of Weekly World News because they don't have editors. One supposes that the anonymous author of the site, in between running from a spittle-flecked Mickey Kaus, would care to reveal the name of his or her editor.
By the way, whomever owns the site is truly making every effort to hide their identity.
John Derbyshire is facilitating a debate with readers over whether or not About Schmidt is a conservative movie, much as they have over every movie that either A.) features America in it or B.) doesn't feature America in it, but everyone has American accents.
This, even after Jonah Goldberg's sternly worded reminder that conservatives don't need to make all art and entertainment about their conservatism. That having been brought up and summarily discarded, let's argue whether Kathy Bates' naked body is pro- or anti-"normal".
Shorter Guy Who Didn't Watch The Movie For The Story: The movie wasn't one long, slurpy kneepad fiesta for the Midwest, therefore the filmmakers resent true American values.
There's a rebuttal, but I'll save you the time: blah blah blah happy gay people blah blah blah Marine blah blah natural lubrication. Or maybe it was "smiling through tears", but the point remains anyway.
Two things: I live in the Midwest. A lot of people in the Midwest spend a lot of time wanting to be not in the Midwest. Someone who'd lived in the Midwest would know and understand the feeling. It is, in fact, remarkably normal to be dissatisfied with where you are, whether it's a big city or a small town.
Also, it seems like these folks are openly fetishing a sort of Americana mediocrity. Be in the middle - middle-class, middle-America, middle-success, middle-failure, middle-everything. Don't upset the boat. 50% is the goal, and don't worry about anything else. A solid C life is the life for...you!
Why is not being particularly extraordinary, successful, or ambitious now an American value? It's not that married Midwestern suburbia is a bad life outcome...if you want it. But some people don't. A significant number of people. Guess what? They're "normal", too. I mean, all 300 million Americans could settle down in Muncie, but we've got a fairly large land with some fairly different people, not all of whom feel like having the Derbyshire brigade dictate their lives to them.
Why do I get the feeling all of these people hated The Giver?
You know, I don't think a semester of giving the "you're a syphillitic idiot communist" lecture to your classmates is going to endear you to them. Just a thought.
::Shakes head at the utter wrongness of it all::
Donald Luskin, throwing in his early bid for Dumbest Man of 2004, accuses Paul Krugman of numerous ethical violations.
First, to dispense with this blog entry, which seems to take "no, he didn't" as the highest form of logical argumentation.
On Krugman saying that Gore was clearly a better choice (for Naderites) than Bush:
Here's what Krugman said:
The rather simple logical trail of this: Ralph Nader undermined Al Gore even though Al Gore, for the Naderites, was a better choice than Bush. Apparently, the author of this entry needs obvious statements and sentiments reduplicated after every sentence, which will lead to some godawful writing.
"In my opinion, Bush's policy on taxes is wrong, because in my opinion, they're only good for a limited portion of the populace, in my opinion."
I guess the column appearing on the Editorial page as an Opinion column is not quite enough for him.
The quoted portion from Krugman:
The truth - which one hopes voters will remember, whoever gets the nomination - is that the leading Democratic contenders share a lot of common ground. Their domestic policy proposals are similar, and very different from those of Mr. Bush.
Criticisms of the other Democratic candidates, and a call for the campaign between the Democratic nominee and Bush to not be bogged down in the over-the-top sniping now making the rounds that could potentially obscure the real difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. In short, a call for a real campaign between differing ideologies. Sweet God, fire the man right now, he's a threat to journalistic sanctity.
Is it just me, or does this author seem to be setting a standard for what constitutes an "endorsement" that's so incredibly narrow it would bar any NYT columnist from making any statement, positive or negative, about any candidate ever? Maybe this is why Tom Friedman only writes about other people saying the things he thinks.
Back to "John", the author of the entry:
Dude. Dude. DUDE. John Bolton:
Folks like Richard Perle have been arguing for massive, sweeping invasions of the entire region since the early 1990s.
I guess this author's never seen a strawman, then.
Funny how he completely ignores the images in the ad, which visually linked Cleland to bin Laden and Hussein...so, I suppose by this author's standards, he should insert the phrase "I'm purposefully misconstruing the content of the ad to pretend that Krugman lied, when in fact I'm a huge hack."
Or something more pithy, I'm not sure.
GOD!
Simple explanation, and then you get to go play with your Duplo blocks.
Joe Lieberman exploited the capture of Saddam Hussein to place himself on the "right" side of things and Dean on the "wrong" side of things - by comparing him to Saddam Hussein. (Although the author of this piece apparently has some sort of temporary fugue state that hits him whenever someone does something wrong to a Democrat.)
In a similar vein, Donald Rumsfeld has declared that anyone who criticizes George W. Bush supports the terrorists. Similar comments about from both the administration and its supporters. Krugman criticized both. Therefore, it's perfectly consistent, and the guy who wrote this piece is a thorough tool. In my opinion.
Luskin himself offers up "evidence" that Krugman endorsed Democrats in the past. By explicitly declaring that he couldn't endorse any candidate or party, then, in an incredibly partisan fashion, advising someone who wanted to get Bush out of office to make sure to vote next year!
HOW EVIL, DANGEROUS AND PSYCHOPATHIC CAN YOU GET?!?!?
Donald Luskin's resolution in the New Year should have been to get a goddamn clue, but I have a feeling he was too busy sniffing Krugman's jock strap to get around to it. Does anyone else think that the mistletoe at Luskin's house was actually a bloody, miniature, severed Krugman head hanging from a sprig of holly?
World O' Crap points us to an article that attempts to make every single case that what's happening in the Plame investigation is good for Republicans except for one that makes sense.
He has two suggestions. The first is that Ashcroft appointed the special prosecutor because they've already figured out that nothing happened, but they want to put a non-Ashcroft face on it. This, of course, makes no sense, because Ashcroft's been conducting the investigation for the past several months. I mean, are we supposed to believe that the just-announced special prosecutor performed the investigation that he wasn't a part of? Is his stamp on Ashcroft's investigation supposed to validate any perceived impropriety?
The second theory is that the investigation uncovered improbable impropriety in the CIA, rather than in the White House. Now, believing this requires making up two things. The first is that Wilson's investigation, which found no evidence for the Niger accusations (rather obviously - they were fabricated), is in trouble because it merely used the whole "not finding anything" accusation to discredit the Bush Administration's "there's something to find" stance. Problem is, Wilson went, found nothing, and said so. That was his job, and there haven't been any accusations of impropriety in that respect from anyone but the people who are trying valiantly to pretend that this isn't about somebody leaking the name.
The second is that some rules were violated either by Wilson or Plame, but it's mainly based on the logical trail that the rules exist, and Wilson and Plame are Democrats, so they probably broke them. Other than that ironclad bit of evidence, there's literally nothing to anything he says other than a deep and abiding wish that it be true.
Also, Wilson is a liar because in October, when his wife wouldn't let herself be photographed, he said she wouldn't let herself be photographed; but later on, when he changed his mind, he didn't get in his official Democratic Time Machine, go back to October, and change what he said (which was true at the time) in order to save himself the undying wrath of flailing word-parsers.
Pat Robertson: "No matter how badly George W. Bush fucks up, God wants him to be President. Note that I have no personal connection to either the Bush campaign or God."
Check out World O'Crap's post on the Ward Connerly of the anti-feminist crowd. The people they choose to head up their token organizations are just getting worse and worse...
Should an ex-felon involved in a plot to funnel arms to terrorists illegally (among other things) really be lecturing people on being too suspicious of government?
Apparently, R. Emmett Tyrell's New Year's resolutions didn't include telling the truth.
What frustrates me more than anything else is that the stories sound simple enough to sound credible, and when you investigate the facts of the matter, the lies are never simple. For instance, he repeats the "Clark called Rove" lie. Here's the problem with the lie - if you investigate it in a cursory fashion, you will find out that Clark made a statement about Karl Rove not returning his calls. And if you're not particularly interested, you'll wonder why he told such a weird lie.
Well, the problem is, it was a joke. Rather obvious in its telling and context, even. And the problem is, it will become an issue later on. If it's not Clark, it's Dean, if it's not Dean, it's whoever else has said anything. "Bushisms" were jokes, malapropisms...but was there anyone out there seriously suggesting that Bush actually wanted you to eat food off our your family?
Oh, my god! George W. Bush thought that Saddam Hussein terrorized himself! Does he understand anything?!?!?
From The Corner:
Yep. One country goes into a massive, unilateral war, the other expands civil rights. Note also that it was for Canadian Newsmaker of the Year, which is a different distinction altogether. "Person of the Year" is about the person or people who had the most influence on global affairs, while "Canadian Newsmaker of the Year" is about the person or people who made the biggest news impact in Canada.
Goddamn those significant civil rights steps, and that slightly stronger beer. And just what "Hall" were those "Kids" in, anyway?
ABC runs a special on how commercials for unhealthy food target kids. Brent Bozell then asks ABC to be held accountable for the shows they air, because, if you think about it, there's probably a kid somewhere that's watching it, which is just as bad
2. "NYPD Blue." This show airs in the last hour of prime time -- but at only 9 p.m. Central time. One recent show featured a serial killer plot. The victims were raped with a dildo and then strangled to death. The killer confesses she "knocked them on the head, sedated them, inserted the dildo with condom on it, and then strangled them."
The question to Eisner: Do you like being responsible for thousands of children asking their parents what a dildo is?
There's only one tiny problem, which is that the shows in question aren't aimed at kids, and the advertising during them tends to mirror that. The Bachelorette wasn't advertising Ring Pops - it was advertising rings. A tangential, yet somehow oddly relevant, point is that these aren't kids' shows. If a kid is watching Powerpuff Girls and they see twenty ads for chocolate-covered caramel sugar pops, then the problem is that they're seeing things aimed at them which may or may not give them an unhealthy view of food (a point you may or may not disagree with, and one with which I do, to some extent). If the same kid who's watching Powerpuff Girls is also watching NYPD Blue, a show that is meant for adults, then the problem isn't that the show isn't censoring itself for the children who might be watching - the problem is that the parents are letting the children watch something not meant for them.
Bad parenting is not ABC's responsiblity.
(Also note that Bozell's major problem out of assault, rape, murder by strangulation and a dildo...is the dildo.)
This is what would happen if Conan O'Brien did his "In The Year 2000" schtick with David Horowitz.
It's your very last chance to take advantage of NewsMax's sale, which is mainly a bunch of books which I swear weren't bulk-purchased, and which they aren't desperately trying to clear out after they couldn't sell them to the readers already swayed by the advertisements for stock options that don't expire and the promises that you won't die impotent if you just CLICK HERE!
My favorite items? The 90% off "Justice Will Be Done" poster (I guess that's a hard sell even to Bushophiles), the "Off The Record" tape with Bernie Goldberg, marked down a stunning 94.5%, and Chris Ruddy's Vince Foster investigation, which is marked down a mere 75% - but it's a Vince Foster book, still on sale in 2003.
Keep in mind that you also get a free NewsMax.com magazine trial subscription with any order - meaning that after getting that 60% off When Character Was King, complete with 1:5 scale loafer, you also get $20 worth of the cheap NewsMax rag.
Does anyone else get the feeling that NewsMax isn't quite a profit-generating enterprise?
Rich Lowry says that Wesley Clark endorses "voting for felons".
Apparently locked in the great struggle between the forces of Being Honest and Trying To See Down K. Lo's Blouse, he chose the latter. This is what the article in question says:
Lazy phrasing on the part of the Times reporter (Clark pushed for ex-felons, rightly, to get the right to vote) was explained a sentence later. This was too much work for the weak-limbed Lowry, downed by a holiday binge of sugar-free Brach's candy and low-carb light beer, who simply could exert no more force to press the stiff, far-apart keys on his keyboard to type an 'E', an 'X', and a '-'. He's gotta watch out - his doctor told him that being too accurate could kill him!
Compounding the problem is this master of the mental, who apparently knows English well enough to launch into a semantic broadside about an item on an English-only weblog, but doesn't know it well enough to have read the Times piece or actually understand the various semantic meanings of the word "for".
Keep in mind this is exactly how they started in on Gore. If you simply cut out some words, and infer different meanings of others, it's almost like the person actually said it!
What's going to be this year's "inventing the Internet" moment? Stay tuned...
Rich Lowry does us all a favor and distills the Republican attack line on Dean down to 16 questions. Of course, since they're all either banal or purposefully obtuse...oh, hold on. This is Rich Lowry we're talking about. Sorry.
In a solipsistic penumbra of inchoate perfidy, George Will forgot to tell people about his financial ties to the people he's defending. On CNN a little bit ago, he said it was "his business".
I'm sure it was also your business when you lied about Wesley Clark being contacted by a Canadian Middle Eastern think tank (except for the ones that exist, absolutely none exist!). Or when your wife set all your stuff on your lawn because you cheated on her. Or when you looked at stolen debate notes before a Reagan/Carter debate. Or when you switched from polyester to cotton-blend ties.
Sigh. Calamity George rides again.
Looks like Grover Norquist's efforts to push a Stalinist-Republican line are starting to pay off yet again.
"It certainly sounds as if the park service is getting pressure from right-wing extremists groups to drop images of the gay community and add other images," Stachelberg added.
As part of its update, the National Park Service plans to add scenes including rallies by the Promise Keepers, a fundamentalist Christian men's group, and by pro-life groups to the video.
To do so, however, may not be historically accurate after all. Those rallies did not occur at the Lincoln Memorial or even on the nearby Mall, said Bill Line, a spokesperson for the National Park Service.
Having watched the Reagan miniseries/movie on Showtime, and seeing that it was, by and large wholly nonoffensive except to the most obsessive Reaganphiles, it's just a tad apalling that conservatives and conservative Christians are so wholly unable to accept differing viewpoints that the simple acknowledgement of their existence must be excised from the record, replaced with a made-up history.
Christ.
Any bets on whether or not someone uses the traffic fatality figures from holiday travel to justify the loss in Iraq by New Year's?
(You remember: "More people die by X wholly unrelated and freakishly dismissive event than have died in Iraq since the war began, so let's honor the troops by minimizing their sacrifice to nothing more than a traffic accident.")
As Atrios points out, for someone who claims they love America, advocating a global economic depression is kind of, ah...whacko.
It fits in nicely with the rest of his ideology, which tends to boil down to nuclear war, the suspension of the Constitution, and getting banned from places (did you know he's been banned from LiveJournal twice?).
Yoshida reminds me of a kid I used to know. He could phrase things brilliantly, and make you believe that he was as intelligent as anyone you'd ever meet. Then, you realized that the actual content of what he was saying was so incredibly stupid that the effort it took to realize it was an affront to actual thought.
You can ask me if you can take a dump in my car while invoking the dialectic of public vs. private property rights, collectivism, and scientific principles of the composition and nature of matter - but at the end of it all, you're still asking to use my car as a toilet.
Jennifer Graham shows some fine holiday spirit on NRO.
Nothing like far-right wing anecdotal evidence to convince you that all poor people are evil.
Armstrong "Strom's My Daddy" Williams writes an unintentionally ironic piece on how Christmas should be about the internal celebration of Christ's love, and not the material goods we receive.
Thinking about this logical track, Armstrong's wishing for the economy to take a downturn to fulfill his own personal vision of how everyone else should celebrate Christmas! What's bad for America's economy is good for him! HE HATES ALL THAT THIS COUNTRY 30% OFF LEVIS OMG!!!!
And who, exactly, is advocating a material-focused Christmas? Certainly not anti-business, anti-prosperity liberals. Hell, I blame Objectivists.
Over at nascent psychotic Adam Yoshida's blog (adamyoshida.com), he has declared the Ninth Circuit Court an active terrorist cell, advocates an American world dictator/emperor, and that Howard Dean took classes on Communism during the 60s because he's a Red Menace.
Psychooooo...
Why is the left so full of angry, reactionary, dishonest people? And why are they calling themselves GOPUSA, a conservative organization?
Those sneaky Democrats...
Brent Bozell starts off by nearly warming the cockles of my heart. He rails against the recent flood of rich-ality TV, and it almost seems as if he's finally turned the corner, dumping the prudish, irrelevant harangues of the past to talk about the problematic appeal of what Fox and MTV are pushing - stupidity as valor:
Noisier buzz has greeted "The Simple Life," a typically smarmy Fox reality show featuring waifish blonde hotel heiress Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, the adopted daughter of singing star Lionel Richie. They took these two pampered princesses and plopped them smack-dab in the middle of rural America -- Altus, Ark., to be precise. Watch the culture clashes unfold!
Oh, but, nope! You see, Nicole and Paris cursed on TV. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole problem. They cursed. They said naughty words. And we can handle the stupidity and banality with perfunctory outrage, but god fucking dammit, they SWORE!
Honestly, I don't think "millions of children" were watching the Billboard Music Awards, but that's immaterial. In all of the problematic facets of the fame of Hilton and Ritchie, that the idiots cursed at an awards show is probably the least of them. But in the myopically bearded irrelevance of the Media Research Crowd, the big issue is that they cursed on television.
It reminds me of a "Christian" critique of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I read in a local paper (they're on the rack at Kroger's). The group's issue with the film was that it portrayed various superpowered and fictional folk as "real", which would lead to the millions of children - catch a thread? - who saw it to question the existence of God.
My worry was that they were going to see that the plot of the bad guy in the film was to build an army of invisible, hyperstrong, rage-fueled vampires who would travel around the world in super-tanks and submarines with a backup force of flamethrower robots, and think that it was good writing.
But maybe I'm just out of touch with Middle America, where I live.
I had no idea that otherwise-unremarkable Democratic Progressive Lesbian Tammy Bruce (in the same way that Mickey Kaus is a Democratic Debonair Hack - only one part of that is true) was such an asshole.
I can understand why she's so angry at "the left", meaning "not the far right". She's been fired from and/or asked to leave virtually every institution in California. And California, for those of you that didn't know, has a lot of institutions.
I would have gotten my Black Elite commands for the past week, but my phone's been shut off. A few weeks ago, we had this "Blame Whitey For My Fallen Arches" party - all us flat-footed black people got together and listed the reasons white people hated our feet. We came up with 129. Then, we burned a flag and listened to a prerecorded speech by our Great Nubian Leader, Shawn Kemp.
I can send you the minutes of the meeting - I'm Assistant Secretary!
Ranmesh Ponnoru comes to a rather bizarre conclusion about the lack of a death penalty in Europe - they don't have one because they're cowed by fascist elites who told them what to believe, and they fell in line with it afterwards.
One would think that the experience of fascism would embolden Europe against it (and it, in large part has steeled them against right-wing nationalism), but apparently not in Ponnoru's mind. As a result, Europe is full of easily-cowed weaklings dominated by their crypto-fascist overlords...who are also far-left socialists. Or something.
This requires an extremely naive view of the efficacy of the death penalty system. In Florida, for instance, 20 inmates have been exonerated since 1976 - not just had their sentences commuted, but actually found innocent. Jeb Bush's response is to speed up the death penalty process in the state. The error rate is far too large to be conscionable, and yet Ponnoru is content to cling desperately to the assumption that no United States government, state or federal, has ever wrongly put a person to death. The field of anti-death penalty advocacy is fairly small, small enough that its most focus must necessarily remain on the people who are on death row now rather than the people who've already died.
I think the death penalty is simply bad public policy. It's expensive and, more importantly, it's not a deterrent to crime. The fact that it's so error-prone is simply another nail in its coffin, although not a justification on its own - if the death penalty was actually an effective punitive or preventative tool, the focus should be on fixing the errors rather than ending the system.
That ain't the case, though.
You know, I'm sort of tired of every conservative under the sun saying that the Lord of the Rings movies *actually* mean what they say, but it's so fun to watch them fall all over themselves to prove that Hollywood is making a special movie just for them.
John Rhys-Davies says, in a rather roundabout fashion, that democratic tolerance is good, then (I guess) knocks militant Islam, and fears that he's buried his career. Why, I have no idea. I suppose he's a little gung-ho on the whole "Western Civilization did everything good in the world" bit, as well as the whole "Militant Islam is going to take over the entire world until we have nothing left except women in burkas and evil fundamentalist men" part. But the serious stuff that he says, nobody's really going to disagree with, and you can get the hyperbolic stuff five times a night on MSNBC.
If you want to play Halloween dress-up as Aragorn and fight the Muslim/orcish armies with your broomstick in the A/V room, fine. I much preferred the slobbering over the movie when it was limited to how hot Legolas is.
There's nothing like the O'Reilly/Drudge throwdown for pure, infantile, puerile mudslinging masquerading as news. By the way, O'Reilly lied about sales of his book, unremarkably.
The actual reason I went to Drudge, oddly enough, was to get this WaPo article, which notifies us that David Kay will be leaving the hunt for WMD to spend time with his family.
I have two theories about Kay's leaving - one, as the Post reports, is the fact that there's still an actual war going on, and since the official position is now that whatever it is we're having trouble with in Iraq is either unimportant or else it's going well, we're diverting resources from the task that's unimportant (the WMD hunt) to the task that's "going well" (the fight against the insurgents).
The second is that I think Kay simply doesn't want to be the public face of incompetence and even possible deceit on the part of the Bush team. The head of the WMD search will very likely come up with little or nothing in the end - and you can damn well bet that the search team will be blamed seven different ways from Sunday for any procedural or tactical screw-ups. If the WMD never materialize, there will be a scapegoat, and the most likely targets are George Tenet and Kay, or whoever's in Kay's position.
Get out while the getting's good, Mr. Kay.
R. Emmett Tyrell knows something you don't know - and it is a burden upon him the likes of which only a Montreal broadcasting company, Howard Dean, and people who are really anal-retentive about Canadian broadcasts on American politics from 1994 involving then little-known New England governors and hack journalists on Richard Mellon Scaife's payroll can understand.
He knows something you don't, and he'll be damned if he won't let you know that he is in possession of something which could be wildly irrelevant to Dean's campaign.
You could also become a jaunty chimneysweep, gallavanting 'round England with a cocked top hat and a scarf knitted by yuh girl, Sarah-May!
The dark (and/or utterly goofy) implication is that Tyrell, who was on a panel with Howard Dean a decade ago on a show in Montreal, has "the goods" on him. Keep in mind that this is the man who runs The American Spectator, the right-wing rag that ran anti-Clinton stories so out of touch with reality that even Howell Raines, then head of the editorial page at the New What The Fuck Did Clinton Do Now Times, wouldn't run with them.
You can hear the sneer on Tyrell's face - he thinks he's got himself another Clinton and hence, another cash cow. Are we on the verge of a second Clinton crux, where it not only becomes de rigeur, but in fact profitable to darkly hint at all manner of scandal and embarassment for personal gain?
Probably, if you want me to be honest.
Did you know that Orson Scott Card is a Democrat? He's a Democrat who hates the entire party, accuses many of us of hating America, being on the side of Osama bin Laden and not even being brave enough to wish death to Bush. He also defines America as George W. Bush:
He's a Democrat who believes that the party to which he supposedly belongs will preside over the destruction of America if given power.
Given such a definition of "Democrat", I hereby announce that I am changing my political affiliation to Republican. I am a Republican.
And like a Card-style Democrat, a Taylor-style Republican believes that his party is full of off-kilter psychotics and traitors who secretly are working against America's best interests, people who cannot be trusted with America's security, and a bunch of other easy strawmen that come from only reading far-left critiques of Republicans/conservatives. The only Republicans I like must be people who vote nearly party-line Democratic, who relentlessly criticize the Republican Party (just like me), and who are also willing to transfer their personal political preference onto the population at large and use ponderous warnings like "You are at danger of being exterminated as a political party" or "You, like al-Qaeda, will be stomped out if you do not stop your dangerous opposition to what I believe and become a second, identical party with a different name."
And remember folks - all of my critiques of Bush are coming from a Republican.
I hate Dean because he's not Bush. I prefer my President to sound like an issue of Thor.
Adam Yoshida (famously of the "anyone who opposes the war in Iraq is a traitor and should be shot and Glenn Reynolds only disagrees in the sense that he doesn't think it's necessary to kill you...yet" entry) sent around his response to Saddam's capture. In e-mail. Why, I don't know. But apparently he's going to attack liberals at their source - the Interweb, which our spirtual overlord, ALGORE, invented.
Some choice bits (after the cut, he advocates tactical aggressive nuking of boats in open water):
Given the chance, I am certain that the international Hate American-brigade and the Democratic Copperheads here at home would be eager to go over the history of the Iran-Iraq War in which the United States supported Iraq against Iran and vice versa.
Why would it be an unmitigated disaster? Because it would be, mother fucker. (If we're the Democratic Copperheads, is Yoshida the Republican Platypus?)
Shorter Yoshida: I'd explain why I'm right, but the liberal media will be here any second to give me a makeover and have John Cougar Mellencamp serenade me...so let's just take it as a given that I'm right, m'kay?
I'd almost agree with him, but then I realize that the greatest test of a new Iraqi justice system will be trying its greatest criminal fairly and setting on the record for all Iraqis, in painstaking detail, exactly what Saddam did and why he was a tyrant. Of course, what do I know? I'm a "Copperhead".
(I wonder, though, is that like a "chickenhead"? In which case, I must inform you that my weave is human hair.)
Mm-hmm. He really said that. And thinks it, too. Why? Because he's an idiot.
Um..no? How imbecilic do you have to be to say that we can afford another war right now? Is Captain Canada proposing to lead the Light Brigade into Tehran? Will he pay for it? Is he going to clone our army of cheap and inexhaustible super soldiers that will serve in place of our exhausted and overextended troop corps? No?
Will he kiss my ass, then?
WHO THE FUCK IS "WE"?
And we're already raising money to pay for basic soldiers' needs - because the Bush/Cheney army isn't outfitted with necessary gear, and many towns and municipalities are taking up collections to send necessities to their troops. I contributed 20 bucks last week to Dayton soldiers, actually. Exactly how far is reality over Yoshida's head?
Is there anything we could buy to make silly-ass Keyboard Brigadiers stop talking out of their asses? The 'United States Enema Coalition'?
I'd be angry, but not for the reasons Yoshida lays out. We have a larger military budget than almost every other nation on Earth combined, and, if Yoshida had ever met an American soldier in his life, he'd know that most of us are already involved - they're our friends and our relatives and our significant others. I'd be pissed because Yoshida would misappropriate the fight against terrorism to try and piss me off.
And because he's a turd of a human being.
See? Turdalicious.
Our Favorite Canadian Psychopath wants us to detonate a nuclear weapon as an aggressor. And it'd be okay, because "a nuclear strike in blue water would have very little effect upon the environment; however, it would provide an ideal demonstration of American resolve." Okie-dokie. We're not letting you near the steak knives anymore, Hannibal.
By the way, have I brought up that Yoshida is defining the resolve of another country? And that he's a psychopathic freak?
I didn't know "not wanting to get fucking nuked ourselves" was a "silly societal prejudice", you shit-brained worthless sack.
Adam Yoshida: Approved by Instapundit, disowned by his family.
By the end of the day, someone will use this quote to indict everyone who opposed the war and/or doubts the hunt for WMD.
Chances are it'll be one of the head of the Coalition of the Insecure: Glenn, Andy, or the Hydra. You can find hordes of like sentiments, including a parade of fatuous "awards" over at Andy's site. See, that's why he deserves the big bucks - the incessant creation of awards based on overhyped and misrepresented controversies that serve as shorthand for him making an argument!
And Glenn's just gone off the deep end. I'd advise his family to keep their hands away from his mouth and make no sudden movements, because he's likely to start gnawing.
I'm truly appalled at the fact that so many of the vanguards of deep Internet thought are reduced to so much meaningless crowing and chest-puffery, actively lashing out at people who aren't thinking like them (or, more often, are thinking like them, but aren't thinking about the same things).
You didn't win anything over us. You aren't morally validated, and we aren't morally impugned. The people that you're actually talking to, and not the one poster you found on Democratic Underground or the one violent anarchist movement you found in the German woods, don't match any of the caricatures you're putting up. However, since so many of you utterly refuse to listen to anyone who isn't stroking your unjustifiably large egos, I hereby present to you gibberish, which is what anything anyone says will become after you're done "interpreting" it:
Orange staple recorder, mungo top yarn! Rubberband compacted nova grapple, evening, cylinder brassy gemstone.
It would be fab to be Rod Dreher. And stupid.
Noticed that he posted that hours after most of the "major-blogger suspects on the left" had posted several times on it...maybe he's friends with the Hon. Judge I. Dunno over at Hippercritical (incidentally, posted four hours before Dreher makes an ass out of himself).
Does it strike anyone else that major reaction on much of the right (internet, print and TV) yesterday to Saddam's capture was about Democrats, liberals, and anti-war folk? It's almost as if they only cared about the War in Iraq as a means to cement domestic political power rather than...nah.
There were some good folks yesterday, particularly Tacitus. But the sad thing is so much of the reaction was typified by Dreher, a thoroughly dishonest search for methods to smear Democrats and liberals, quite often not even with things they said or did, but instead their conjecture about things that we would say or do at some point in the future and/or things we didn't say or do because they're too lazy and/or deficient to actually look for that.
I can't wait until someone quotes this entry as proof that I don't care about Saddam being captured, though. And I'll be right here, laughing at your silly monkey ass.
Kathleen Parker, who appears able to toss out these beauties on a level unmatched by many, undesired by all, is the 1,459th on the conservative media's "I Hate Al Gore" train. Her reasons are slightly further reaching than most...see, her Al Gore will do whatever it takes to become President...or Secretary of State...or Supreme Court Justice...or fireman.
See, Howard Dean is Al Gore's track to wish fulfillment, to him getting what he wants, everyone else (besides, uh, Howard Dean) be damned. Much like everything else Al Gore has done, the most minor slight (for instance, your endorsement of another candidate leaking before you have a chance to call your former running mate) offers us a chance to make shit up peer into your inner soul.
I have to say this to Joe: when virtually every single conservative has taken you up as the cause celebre, your cachet as a Democratic candidate is pretty much shot. Who is "Al Gore Called Me Late" supposed to rally? It's not quite "Tippacanoe and Tyler, Too," to be honest.
Bill O'Reilly on the Today Show, ad nauseum:
"I know some stuff about what Saddam's done that I can't prove yet, as well as some stuff said by other people that they can't prove, but they'll say. AND I'LL YELL REAL LOUD!"
Oh, and he's bitching about Al Franken hardcore. It's also him versus all liberals, and he's lying about Levittown...again. It's like he's...annoying.
From the uber-exclusive NewsMax.com "Insider Report", whoever the hell writes it takes down the New York Times because they made a telemarketing call. I'm serious.
You bet we signed up for the national do-not-call list as soon as it became available. Does that stop those annoying telemarketers? Nope, but that’s OK with us, because we enjoy reporting them and making them pay big fat fines.
We had to rush home Monday during lunch to let in the carpet guy and answered the phone, but instead of him it was the Times shilling for subscriptions to the Democrat party’s house organ. It’s bad enough we have to read the Old Gray Lady at work; we’re not about to read genocidal dictator Joseph Stalin’s favorite paper at home and told that to the inane-sounding caller.
“Why are you breaking the do-not-call law?” we interrogated. “Does the New York Times make it a practice to break the law?”
The bubbly salesgal lost her effervescence. She, being apparently as ill-informed as former co-worker Jayson Blair, claimed to have never heard of this extremely popular law.
She insisted we had to call 1-800-NYTIMES to get off the paper’s list of people to pester, but we explained that no, it’s the Times’ responsibility to obtain and obey the do-not-call list or face fines of up to $11,000 for each violation.
Actually, slapnuts, the "national do-not-call" list isn't national law yet. At least seven states aren't enforcing the law, and for some reason, I have the feeling that not all of the New York Times' operations necessarily happen in New York. Some happen in New Jersey, which...
::Takes a look at the DNC list::
...doesn't have a DNC list yet! Glory be, the funk's on me!
Do you get the feeling that the call was actually just them ranting at the telemarketer until she got her manager, them hanging up, and then making up this delightful story in order to gain some street cred? They want to move up to the Corner, but you gotta prove you can hang. Can you drink a Lemon Diet Coke...without ice? Word, word...can you blame gay people and Jesse Jackson for holiday sales if they're lackluster? Daaaaaaaamn! You're in.
Kathryn, could you run down to Dunkin' Donuts? In Tempe?
I have what I called the Dick Morris Rule of Thumb: everything he says is exactly like his thumb.
He just pulled it out of his ass.
I lost all respect for Dick Morris when I saw a 60 Minutes segment from Clinton's first term (after Bill Clinton supposed got mad at/pushed/punched/beat him with a tire iron) where he talks about packaging a candidate, and he said it was like a potato chip. To paraphrase, you can't just slap new and better packaging on a potato chip and hope it sells better, you have to make a new chip.
Which is, of course, news to Frito-Lay, who've had massive success with line packaging overhauls over the years, as well as anyone who's ever sold any bit of nostalgia ever. Oh, and Coca-Cola (anyone could have sold "New Coke"; it took a genius to make old Coke again and market it as a new product).
In short, Dick Morris knows nothing about politics, but he is eminently willing to make a good storyline for whoever's paying him. Which leads us to this feature article in Newsmax about Dick Morris' prognostications in the wake of Schwarzenegger's victory in California.
You know what also thwarted her planned presidential bid in 2004? Her not running. By that standard, Schwarzenegger also thwarted my grandmother's planned presidential bid. Her platform? "Jesse, can you go get my crossword dictionary?" She has planned to support the eventual Democratic nominee, and will be on Meet the Press next week.
Uh...voters didn't want one-party hegemony? The Republicans ran better campaigns? Knowing Dick Morris, there'll be a convoluted answer involving gay marriage, leading satisfaction indicators, and clock radios.
Because he had no platform and no skill as a politician? Look ma, I'm Dick Morris!
I get the feeling this is a David Brooks sort of deal. "The GOP must avoid satisfying the will of the American people too deeply, lest they be left so fat and sated that their corpulently stubby fingers accidentally select a Democratic candidate in 2004."
The more I read about the people surrounding Bill Clinton, from Dick Morris to the DLC, the more amazing it is he won two consecutive terms.
The best stuff, however, comes from the rest of Newsmax magazine, which is apparently just their own stories reprinted (which are in turn reprinted from newswires and other stories, by and large).
Perhaps you shouldn't give away the stories on the site. Sort of undercuts the need for reading the magazine. And, uh, who cares?
Because he's Sean Hannity?
Hold on, lemme guess: they're representing victims, who are suing for damages. And they'll get paid out of those damages for their work. Next up on Newsmax? How plumbers are cashing in on your kids' stuffing your socks down the toilet, by John Stossel.
If this has to do with that run-in at the restuarant back in '99, Hillary just wants to let you know that the Hellmouth is closed and T'rna'ghjhial (pronounced "Timmy") is fine and well - he's working on some anti-terror legislation as we speak.
I'm actually tempted to read this just to see how despicable leftist bureaucrats are keeping short people from reaching their full potential (and the popsicles in the back of the freezer).
I think the reason so many righties have gone crazy is because they find themselves unable to argue for anything, and so must simply consistently argue that everyone else is much, much worse than they are, even if they must find miniscule pockets of objectionable people in foreign countries with which to tar the millions of people tangentially in agreement with a single position they have - opposing a war.
As such, Andrew Sullivan is officially part and parcel of the right-wing hate group Posse Comitatus, because he is a Christian, he believes in First Amendment rights, and he constantly critiques Paul Krugman, a Jewish man, as well as other Jewish people at points.
He also smells faintly of Bactine and onions. That, I can't explain.
After all, we can indict entire sides of the political spectrum based on what any one or few members do. It's the American Reynolds way.
Republican governor of Connecticut John G. Rowland accepted potentially illegal home improvements from numerous sources, including a state contractor. This comes after first lying and saying that he paid for them himself.
Tim Allen, when approached for comment, barked a lot, then proceeded to screw up a relationship with a family member, find a contrived manner of making it up to them, and stand up for some vague principle in 22 minutes of airtime.
John G. Rowland called Allen "a credit to his country."
Mark Alexander's column leads me to ask: whose animal avatar has had a better movie career? The Democratic donkey or the Republican elephant?
They've had Dumbo. We've had Shrek. They've had the 1996 Bill Murray flop Larger Than Life. We've had any number of movies involving journeys through the Southwest, and Central and South America.
The trump card, however, is Donkey Kong. Name an elephant-related monkey who's had as much impact on American popular culture, who's encourage as much international trade
Why do I bring this up? Because it's about as relevant as Alexander's column is to politics, the Democratic nomination process, or the presidency of the United States.
Dean only has two hands. Should he have whipped out his penis and raised that? A true centrist position!
Why was it a "Demo-debacle"? Because Democrats were there!!! Hahahahaha!
Other Alexander jokes:
Q: What's brown and sticky?
A: A stick.
Q: What has four wheels and flies?
A: Well, and airplane has at least four wheels, technically. And DemoKKKraps suk ballz!
Q: Isn't the answer "a garbage truck"?
A: Aren't you a garbage truck?
Q: When does your mom come to pick you up?
Oooookay...so we have our first loony TownHall columnist comparing a Democratic candidate to Hitler. I'm surprised he didn't bring up the Jewish opposition (Lieberman) to Dean...it would have strengthed the comparison even further. Oh, and the "Dean For America" armbands that every follower is required to wear - on their left arm! Moderate Vermont fascism...she's a-creepin'!
I'm so glad I can leave my house now without worries of an Iraqi-bred holocaust at my doorstep. They're so difficult to clean up, but here's a hint: lemon juice.
Of course, I could also leave my house without worries of an Iraqi-bred holocaust before the war, too. But now I have the added worry of hearing about one of several friends dead from a terrorist attack in Iraq where they're serving!
McGovern was also right, dipshit.
As we've learned from George W. Bush, one of the joys of being Commander-In-Chief is never having to say, "Reporting for duty, sir." He had a medical condition. They told him to bring his medical records. He got classified as 1-Y. By the way, since the people at the Federalist apparently don't know what Federalism is, should we really trust them as medical experts?
Alexander also made the bold prediction that Lieberman will be seen as an affronted avatar for centrist Democrats who are put off by Dean's anti-war views (on one war), his "pro-homosexual" views (can we now officially label Republicans as the party that hates homosexual people, not homosexuality?), and his plan to canonize Che Guevara as the first official American secular saint.
It's something we've been talking about at the MeetUps, and right now we've got 47% for, 53% against. But we're getting those America lovers one by one, mainly through breaking their snap braclets and then giving them forceful far-left oral sex.
Andy Sullivan (who, by the way, is in the middle of an interminable pledge drive - I guess he's the internet's PBS) says that Dean leaving the Episcopalian Church "over a bike path" (more accurately, over an issue of public land use that his church opposed) makes him "godless".
Does this honestly make any sense (and if you think Sully has read a word of Wolfe since he didn't make it through Bonfire of the Vanities, donate $20 - you can do it by AmEx, Visa, Mastercard, debit card, Amazon gift certificate, your firstborn child or Flooz)? What strikes me is how uninformed Sullivan is - in the exact same interview, a scant single exchange before, Woodruff lets us in on a secret bit of information. Well, not so much secret as not in the information directly presented to Andrew Sullivan in front of his face with no effort involved.
They're asking what does this say about the depth of your commitment to your own faith?
So, we're seeing that Dean is still a member of a church...which I guess is now one of the first signs of godlessness, along with baptism and prayer.
The rest of the little rant about WASPs and bike paths and Dean "turning his back" on his heritage reek of cultural chauvinism...and flop sweat when you realize that Sullivan is himself a weak pretender to a mantle of aggressive Americanism trying desperately to fit in.
And we now have our definition of "godless": switching churches for a reason other than a massive, life-altering situation like realizing you're an alcoholic or not wanting to be bothered by all your compassionate, caring friends because you're Jewish.
God bless (or not), and good day.
Charles Krauthammer has a column which reads like a breathless insider rag telling you the skinny on what's happening in politics, but actually only says the following: Dean is the front runner unless he loses some primaries.
You get paid for this? How the hell does Krauthammer watch sports?
"I think that the Celtics will win unless they play worse than the 76ers and get outscored. It's something to watch out for - the same thing happened in the Spurs/Timberwolves game yesterday. Paul Pierce has a warrior complex, while Iverson is suffering from a Post-Larry Brown Dementia."
Purveyors of noted nutsoid Misha have issued a fatwa against Bushflash.com.
Of course, Misha has also decided to send the Twenty Years of Impotence Hate against President Bush, which is actually fairly indiscernable from any of the other pathetic ranting he puts up (paraphrased):
By the way, just a sample of the threats:
The rest of us, however, aren't the gov't, in case you've forgotten, and quite few of us would be more than happy to wipe that nervous little grin off your traitorous mug - with a belt sander.
Mm-hmm. It truly takes the stupidest among us to create a full and vibrant American society - otherwise, who do we have to be better than? Misha, I thank you for your contribution to the American discourse, particularly the manner in which you manage to make virtually everything else ever written, even drunken poetry to the ex-girlfriend you're stalking, seem positively literary in comparison.
You are a true patriot. If we redefine "patriot" as someone who's made every decision in his life to compensate for the systematic inadequacy that defines him. And since you won't find that insulting enough, and since I don't particularly feel like joking about raping your family or sending you a bullet with your name on it (since that's, you know, insane)...well, I hope you and your readers enjoy the nice visits from the law enforcement people.
Hint: If they're female, call them "cuntfish". That'll really help your case.
This Paul Greenberg article is one of the few things on TownHall is one of the few things they've ever published that's readable on its own merits, because it largely shies away from the normal pattern of TownHall articles. Which is gibberish with Howard Dean's name sunk in there, anymore.
But what got me was this line:
Imagine if someone referred to any morsel of Southern dialect as a "Southern-fried barbarism". By Monday night, you'd be on the O'Reilly Factor trying to explain why we shouldn't renounce your claim to humanity, and you'd be "out of touch with America".
When did the South win the culture wars, and why are they acting like they haven't?
Peggy Noonan: All conservatives are spineless wimps who have it easy, not like real man Bob Bartley with his soft grey hair that I loved to stroke and pet.
This has to be the weirdest memoriam I've ever read - in a movement that's founded on the belief that conservatives are oppressed, trod-upon and relentlessly attacked without protection, you memorialize a guy who started that by calling bullshit on the whole thing.
Such soft grey hair, though...
Instapundit has spent the past few days blowing a gasket because the media (besides CNN, ABC, I believe CBS and NBC and the New York Times) isn't covering the Iraq anti-terror marches. Now, one could argue that this has a lot more to do with the America-centered provinciality of the media (if Glenn's was, you know, a valid complaint), and/or the fact that the biggest story in a war zone is the ongoing war, but instead we have the knuckleheaded insistence that whatever the media isn't reporting is what they should report.
The basic position of Glenn on this issue is that American lives and a conflict in which American lives are at stake isn't as important as any of a number of other things he could bring up, because he can score political points with them. He actively wants people to not care about the War in Iraq, and instead to Tinkerbell us away to a reconstruction in a mythically peaceful Iraq where the biggest news story is a peaceful protest rather than ongoing warfare. Why doesn't he care about the troops?
If all the media did was follow around cute, tow-headed Iraqi children as they played cops and robbers, they'd be accused of blatant disrespect for the troops by not covering their hardships. If the media devoted 24 hours a day to "positive" media coverage of Iraq, they'd be criticized for not covering other positive things that Bush has done. If they did everything the media-bias clowns wanted, but had someone on who argued that they should be covering the actual war, they'd be assailed for giving voice to anti-American sentiments and wanting us to lose.
You can't win for losing - as much as the Republicans criticize Democrats for the way Bush's policies are assailed, they do the exact thing they criticize Democrats for. Needlessly and reflexively complaining, complaining that the media's still wrong when they do the "right" thing, relentlessly, poundingly negative all the time, with solutions either so untenable or so wacky that they're not worth listening to.
Come to think of it, they do the same thing with Democrats, too...hm.
Sorry, Rich Lowry, but I think we've found the book that's going to upstage Legacy as the preeminent fact-free, borderline farcical broadside against Clinton:
Savior Clinton: An Evil American King.
Not to be missed is the part where he enslaves the noble elf-people, and the unicorns have to make a wondrous, musical trek through the forest to the Castle Of Despair And Welfare Reform to save them, learning about life and love along the way. The voice of Solnar, the Unicorn Champion will be performed by Bruce Willis.
I swear, it's not even like Ann Coulter tries anymore. Either she's sauced, or she's off her meds, because she manages to insult:
- All Democrats
- Howard Dean
- All Howard Dean supporters
- All government employees
- Teachers
- Your sense of basic human decency
What I find amazing is that she declares that voting Republican is voting against your own self interest (this shortly after she verbally defecates on every baseless generalization she can come up with):
It's my basic philosophy that Ann Coulter is simply the public face of the Republican Party*...without impulse control. You can tell that this stuff is in the mind of Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney and William Safire - they're just not stupid enough to actually say it.
And, of course, government jobs are Democratic handouts. Unlike the private market, the government employs people who are loafers, parasites and layabouts, while everyone who works in the private market is industrious, intrepid, and 100% efficiently productive. And Coulter, by extension, is being paid by the goverment to write this crap.
Also, Townhall has this delightful interview with Bernie Goldberg.
Shorter Bernie: the liberal media denying that it's a liberal media only reinforces more that it is a liberal media. Journalists are alcoholics, but for bias. Also, even though the media, cultural and economic centers of America are New York and California, they should move into the "heartland" so that they can rack up the frequent flyer miles. Also, you can quote Strawman Liberal Media Person because it's what everyone in the media thinks.
Shorter Shorter Bernie: I'm still really pissed at everyone at CBS, and my liberal media idea has devolved into a fetishization of the Midwest.
Shorter Shorter Shorter Bernie: Fuck you, pay me.
*Changed for valid pedantic reasons.
...Ben Shapiro writes poetry. And talks about sports like an emasculated George Will.
Questions arise over what, exactly, qualifies Ben Shapiro to write about baseball, marriage, personal care and hygeine, poetry or politics, given his demonstrated lack of knowledge about any of the various topics. But, instead, sit back and enjoy the delicious verbal twists and shots at the Washington press corps who's declared that this is a war for oil. Yep - remember when Chris Matthews ripped off his dress shirt to reveal "No More Imperialism" written in oil paint across the downy hair of his chest? No?
C+ for effort, D- for execution, F for the picture, B- for the sports teams - could be forgiven, except for being a fan of the White Sox. And not mentioning pro football, America's real #1 sport, at all.
Overall, a solid D effort. Good stuff. Take a lap.
Will Verhs criticizes Josh Marshall without apparently having read the post in question - which is sort of ironic in a post continually calling for "even-handed" and "honest" blogging.
Here's what Verhs says:
Here's what Marshall actually says:
It's filled with stuff like this from the lede ...
My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ."
Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.
Hmmm. I don't know. Hasn't Dean lived in a predominantly rural state for like twenty-five years? (According to census data, Vermont is the most rural state in the nation.) Every pol likes to suit his biography to the needs of the moment. But that fact would seem to give Dean's statement at least a measure of credibility, no?
A weird column ...
See, Marshall didn't even focus on the Internet "diss". He focus on the rural "diss" (actually spelled "dis"), which, as Marshall pointed out made no sense whatsoever on Brooks' part. He, in fact, implicitly criticizes a Democrat in his lead. He does, however, rightfully criticize an attack on a politician he's not particularly fond of because it's inaccurate - which would seem to me to be eminently even-handed.
It's kind of hard to call for evenhandedness when you blatantly distort what someone said in the exact same entry, one would think. When Brooks has to as far out of his way as he did to get an attack column on Dean...I think "primal scream" is a fair characterization.
None are so unfair as the guardians of fairness...or something. I'm not too good at making up pithy aphorisms.
Getting off the Gore/Dean/Clinton/Injustice League tack for a bit, I just have to point out that this has been one of the dumbest days in the history of modern American discourse.
Via World O' Crap, Sam Smith of Newsmax:
Did you hear Dunkin' Donuts' Coffee hit single, "69 Cents"? It's so dirty!!! And DDC's opinion on the Alternative Minimum Tax? It makes my booty bounce!
I really hope this is the Bush/Cheney plan for 2004 - completely nonsensical comparisons. "The tax cuts only help the top ten percent? You know what percentage of Americans are named George? .0014%, you asshole!"
I take my leave. And my rum. I'm going to be needing it soon.
