Wonkette
When William F. Buckley founded National Review in 1955, did he know it would one day morph into a low-lit bathroom where plump “conservative” writers emote like teenagers filming “THIS IS HOW I FEEL, WORLD” YouTube diaries? Originally envisioned as a place where you could read defenses of Joseph McCarthy and Francisco Franco while sipping a sparkling Negroni, National Review today is mostly shallow wingnuts weeping into their Haagen-Dazs about mean liberals, evil Muslims, and “the ruling class” (what would WFB think?!). Standards have slipped so much that it now employs Andrew McCarthy, possibly of Weekend at Bernie’s fame, as their Muslim Terrorism expert. Andrew has just published a hefty tome titled The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. What’s next, Corner kids? Gay Islam: Why It Will Eat You by Emilio Estevez?
McCarthy has covered jihadist territory before. He seems to be NR’s Super Expert on Islamist terrorism, though it’s not clear if he speaks any Arabic or knows anything about Islam. In 2007 he published a book called Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, which makes him sound like some kind of reverse Lawrence of Arabia, bravely fighting against the Arabs in an endless 70mm expanse of sand and sky (which is probably exactly what that book is about; we’ve never read it). Lately he’s been spending his time hyperventilating about the Ground Zero Death Mosque/Discotheque, and about David Cameron using plain English to describe Gaza.
We can’t confirm what The Grand Jihad is about, because it seems to be about everything feared and hated by the “blow up all Muslims now plz”/ Tea Bag-populist psyche. There is no coherent structure or argument; it’s essentially a long hard cry into McCarthy’s bucket of ice cream/Tiger Balm mix. But we CAN confirm that the cover looks like a patriotic Wonkette-crafted Blingee.
A few things covered and vigorously condemned in this book: Barack Obama, Barack Obama’s bow to the king of Saudi Arabia (because the proper way to host Saudis is to hold their hands while showing them around your ranch), Barack Obama’s colonial subject bow to Queen Elizabeth II, Barack Obama’s father (who instilled Communism in his estranged son), something called “the Left,” Muslims, Saul Alinksy and his legions of followers, Karl Marx and his daily walks to the British Museum, and eighteenth-century French philosophers.
Yes, poor old Jean-Jacques Rousseau — brilliant writer, flawed-but-interesting thinker, actual dead French-Swiss person — is singled out for particular demonization in this book, because he has good words for Islam in one of his Froggy thought-experiments. Your reviewer wouldn’t be surprised if Andy only knew this Frenchman second- or third-hand. Either that or he reads him in the most literal-minded, context-free, unimaginative way possible.
Speaking of ignoring context, let’s just pick out the most entertaining fragments from this doorstop abomination:
Promise? The word is more fog from the vaporous arsenal to which Alinskyites resort when they know that clarity would betray their radicalism and antagonize the public.
HAHA, can you imagine a “vaporous arsenal” with actual fog-weapons? You try to hold the gun, but it’s pure mist and easily dissipates! Total buzzkill! Also:
What was this promise that Obama incessantly evokes when speaking and writing about his father? It was communism.
The bibliography (or “Notes,” as he calls it) is literally nothing but links to op-ed columns that Andy reads on the Internet (and, saddest of all, probably re-reads), books written by his fellow conservative columnists, and wonky nightmare papers put out by various conservative think tanks.
This book is full so full of horror, failure, and tears-of-an-eagle kitsch that we should build a mosque over it.
The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America by Andrew McCarthy, Encounter Books, 464 pages, $18.45
Your Wonkette book reviewer tried to write a more nuanced piece, but some books insist on being crimes against nature. SEND IDEAS FOR REVIEWS to greer.mansfield@gmail.com
The crypto-nazi is rolling in his crypt.
The key word in the title is Sabotage. It’s Bill Donohue of The Catholic League’s word. He wrote a Washington Post editorial last year about liberals “sabotaging” America as a Fifth Column seeking to claim the real prize — the Roman Catholic Church.
“Sabotage” keeps the military metaphors flowing, because then we keep the “we’re always at war” thing happening that justifies killing, beating, and torturing your fellow Americans and abridging their rights. As for Rousseau, it’s just shocking that McCarthy doesn’t have done with it and announce that the Enlightenment was a mistake and that it’s time to go back to pure deduction from known principles, like NRO editorials.
$18.45, that comes out to 3.97 cents a page. Still not buying it.
Do I need to read this book?
The living wingnut dipshit McCarthy is just continuing with Buckley’s original mission for the National Review: to create pseudo-intellectual justifications for segregation and racism. He’s just changed the targeted minority, and can’t quite get the pseudo-intellectual part right.
I’m telling all y’all, it’s a mirage.
I think I can save myself $18.45 and print out 464 pages of comments to Politico stories about the Ground Zero mosque or birth certificates. I’m sure it will be just as enlightening and I will get more all cap sentences for my money.
How low can a guy go? Stars in “Pretty In Pink” and “St. Elmo’s Fire” and now is writing for the National Review?
Hollywood is a cruel bitch.
…
Huh? Not THAT Andrew McCarthy?
Dr. Stephen Hawking must be a dang muslin, cause he says terrifying stuff.
From that damned liberal wiki:
Rousseau criticized Hobbes for asserting that since man in the “state of nature . . . has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue”. On the contrary, Rousseau holds that “uncorrupted morals” prevail in the “state of nature”
Rousseau did deny that morality is a construct or creation of society. He considered it as “natural” in the sense of “innate”, an outgrowth of man’s instinctive disinclination to witness suffering, from which arise the emotions of compassion or empathy, sentiments whose existence even Hobbes acknowledged, and which are shared with animals.
So, in conclusion: Rousseau argued that morality was an innate quality of people, and people didn’t need the state to tell them the difference between right and wrong.
Why is Andy McCarthy, and by extension (to employ the very same rhetorical tool that Andy McCarthy uses) All Conservatives, such a moral relativist and/or statist? And just for good measure, lets assume Latte-sipping, and something about political correctness.
BTW, five links. Impressive. You know we actually believe that this dumbshit has a book coming out and that it’s full of stupid garbage for morons.
Geogre: Is Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism haunting us both these days?
Am I gonna have to ditch my oija board and actually read that book? [insert scream of choice here at disembodied knocking sound]
——————–
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play (”When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” and “universities are nests of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
I’m getting onboard with this right wing nutz book writing gravy train.
How’s this for title?
Blinded by the Jihad!
The liberal compact florescent light bulb conspiracy to abuse children by turning them gay with abortion of all conservative preborns with mandatory recycling of fetuses!!!!!11!
I’ll be rich I tells ya! Rich!
Oh, wow, it gets even better. Still from the wiki:
In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for idleness and luxury have contributed to the corruption of man. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful and had crushed individual liberty; and he concluded that material progress had actually undermined the possibility of true friendship by replacing it with jealousy, fear, and suspicion.
In contrast to the optimistic view of other Enlightenment figures, for Rousseau, progress has been inimical to the well-being of humanity, that is, unless it can be counteracted by the cultivation of civic morality and duty
Seriously, what is there for Andy McCarthy or any of the other National Review hacks not to like about this guy? He seems way more their speed than Hobbes’s “people need government to protect themselves from each other, because they’re all shitbags” philosophy.
ManchuCandidate: You can tell it’s not because it’s published by the National Review; Breitbart’s dozen BigWhatever sites are where all the conservative washed-up former celebrities like Victoria Jackson and the A-Team’s Faceman go to spew their shit.
McCarthy was kind of cute in the 80’s, but my, how times have changed. I tried to read one of the links posted to arrive at a non-wonkette filtered appraisal, but in the first paragraph, he quoted some blogger as “nailing it” - I always stop right there. I have to, because he might actually whip out the usual blogger nightmare of using. full. stops. for. emphasis. which. makes. me. puke. This is happening so often these days. I hate bloggers, all of them. Horrible essayists, failed writers, ALL of them.
GeneralLerong: “We need a Commander in Chief, not a professor of law.”
Your Wonkette book reviewer tried to write a more nuanced piece, but some books insist on being crimes against nature.
Thank you — that was one of the funniest things I’ve read all day. I am anxiously awaiting for the nuanced review of Ms. Palin’s second coloring book coming out this fall.
Those are some very awkwardly constructed sentences there McCarthy, I’ll give you that.
Geogre:The “killing, beating, and torturing your fellow Americans and abridging their rights” consequences of the “we’re always at war” thingie are just incidental damage. Not really the point. The point is the continuing redistribution of wealth from the taxpaying class (i.e. the little people) to the military, industrial, congressional complex and their patriotic friends at places like Halliburton (fortunately now located in Dubai). (see also the “Cross of Iron”)
This is one of those periods of opportunity for right-wing hacks where anything with a catchy title about the left destroying America will sell, even if it’s filled with ludicrous drivel. Sort of a gold rush inspired by the success of Jonah Goldberg’s nonsense, carried through Sarah Palin’s two pieces of sordid, pointless crap, Glenn Beck’s various schmaltzy fabricated-memoir-as-grand-expression-of-values and now everyone more articulate than a RedState commenter is trying to shove their collection of pissant essay fragments and Saul-Alinsky-is-the-puppetmaster ravings at their audience of developmentally disabled pork-rind-smacking Crocks-and-fanny-pack fellow travellers. Verily, they are frantically milking the bloat because they know the udder could go dry at any second.
who knew that providing people with health care and jobs was sabotage? If that’s sabotage, what’s his idea of nation-building?
mumblyjoe: So essentially, we wouldn’t buy into this “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” nonsense unless someone had you in a full nelson?
SayItWithWookies: Stoking the fear and then milking the flop sweat of the fearful who actually pay to be more terrified of the negro socialists etc. by buying these crap soup drivel spiels sounds like a nearly perfect self perpetuating scheme. I think any hope that this udder might go dry any time soon is wildly optimistic.
Monsieur Grumpe: Too late. I think Michele Bachmann’s lackeys are ghost
writing that title as we speak.
Didn’t someone already write that book, like in 2002 or so?
JMP: Indeed, BUT I will give NR this: for all its sins, it did at one time publish nifty writers like Joan Didion, Guy Davenport, Gary Wills, Hugh Kenner, etc. So it was an actual magazine with occasional Good Writing once upon a time…but now it’s all Jonah typing “I’ll get back to you on that” memos and all the other horrors…
That was great, Greer.
So… very good book or best book ever?
So Andrew McCarthy is the sweet voice of reason trying to keep Robert Downey Jr.(America) from addiction to the glass dick of Jihad while a smokin’ hot 80s Jamie Gertz (Sarah Palin) serves as his muse.
Less Than Zero? More Like Nothing Less Than A Hero!
GeneralLerong: “Effete snob” sounds like a term that would be used by, well, effete snobs.
Cape Clod: Oh, of course we would, though I imagine most of us are non-utopian enough to believe that most people don’t actually live up to that sort of thing as a matter of practice, and so someone has to sometimes put one’s foot down about, say, human slavery or widespread lynching, or the like.
Right-wing stereotypes of liberals, though? We’re totes about the moral relativism and statism. Which makes Roussou an… odd choice to of a political philosopher to complain about. I mean, I get that right-wingers hate all enlightenment philosophers except for their horrible misinterpretation of Locke, because they were humanists, and also because they formulated the principles upon which our country was based, which they also hate, but won’t admit as much, but Roussou in particular starts to look more their speed than most of them: he disliked progress for fomenting moral corruption, viewed the arts and sciences as a product of vanity rather than the engine of human progress, and that his particular formulation of moral values was innate, and hence, universal.
Geogre:
The Roman catholic Church is a prize? The Pedos and Opus Dei types?
It must be some sort of white elephant prize.
Can you buy anti-Muslim products through NRO? I would like to order their Muslim detector: a crucifix made of pork chops.
I feel compelled and qualified to write my exposé book “How I became a Republican and loved bombing the shit out of Everybody.”
mumblyjoe:
Yeah. What you said.
Ducksworthy: You’ve overlooked the best part, though. They’re guaranteed a good number of sales, because a number of conservative organizations and publications will buy up many copies of the book for the sole purpose of artificially getting it onto the NY Times bestseller list. That’s why so many major right-wing sites are always giving these books away free; they’ve got to do something with those copies.
Greer Mansfield: True, the old school NR didn’t go after the lowest common denominator like they do today. Hell, I think the Post and Times op-ed pages are the only place for intellectual conservatives today.
Ducksworthy: Well, I said basically the same thing about the housing market once, and I think the same principle is in play: more crap of increasingly lower quality sold at a premium, saturating the market. The teabaggers are already becoming fractious over which threads of deluded paranoia they should follow and some are spending more time denouncing their fellows than The Enemy (whichever one that happens to be). When the revolution starts eating itself, that’s when the market starts to go soft. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.
Baldar T Flagass: Was there ever a man more effete, or more snobbish, than William F. Buckley?
I’m going to have to learn more about this “booger-man.”
mumblyjoe: Oh, he’s trying to get at Rousseau’s belief in the need for compassion and fellow being. He seems to think that that’s just in Rousseau, and not in Shaftesbury, Wilkes, Pitt, and Hutchinson.
You see, they want to praise Nietzsche, but they’re afraid to. Therefore, they have to selectively pick on dead people. The idea that humans have an innate sense of beauty, joy, and compassion is not just in Rousseau. It’s an English empiricist idea, too, and even Locke (Mr. Founding Father Emeritus) has it.
GeneralLerong: Thanks for the reference!
I’m going to get that instantly!
I like Eco a great deal and have just finished The Infinity of Lists, but this thesis also sounds like the very poorly argued The Age of Hokum, where the author lays everything on Thatcher. What bothers me about this dichotomy is that it’s false. The anti-rationalists showed that, I thought (Kierkegaard, in particular): you don’t do an Either/Or. The answer is “both/and,” and if you fail to do both, you’ll be at war.
I think it profits people to have eternal war against their fellow citizens, whether they’re Iranian clerics being more Islamic than the other Iranians or Americans trying to be “real Americans.” Instead of talking about McCarthyism of the 1948-1953 period, we’re almost better talking about the few periods when we haven’t had witch hunts.
(Yeah. Be funny or GTFO.)
Threatening a 15 year old with lethal gang rape in order to extract the confession in order to extract the confession that he committed the horrible war crime of throwing a grenade in battle. That’s the American Way!
Obviously a book written to an audience that wants to “take back” America from the usurpers. I’m sure it will sell on that basis.
Sabotage — the loaded word in the title — implies destruction from within. I’m not sure how “Islam” can do that. I guess maybe by exploiting our tradition of religious tolerance by building mosques. Perhaps by not buying Christmas presents.
Meanwhile, I remind Mr. McCarthy that the “Left” are Americans too. America is the whole of its parts, including people you or I don’t agree with. If you don’t like your fellow Americans enough to respectfully disagree, then find a more accomodating country. Love it or leave it, McCarthy.
Wingnuts would be Jihadis if they had Michelle Malkin’s balls.
Ducksworthy: Ah, yes.
The redistribution of wealth was the goal, I agree, but they did it already. Now, the redistribution of the masses’ money is taking place by “financial innovations” like NSF charges, ATM fees, charges for EFT, eliminating tellers, charges for using tellers, and, of course, eliminating the monthly statement (except for a fee) to increase the likelihood of an NSF. Then there is dumping everyone’s retirement into the 401(k) so that it may be “innovated” with in trading. That is what happening to the proles. The national wealth long ago settled into a few pockets, and all we see now is a squabble as they reach around in a circle, doing a baby-elephant-walk of hands in pockets.
Our taxes were always going to go to them, because Ike gave his speech on his last day, and JFK had to be a hawk or be called names by the he-man GOP.
Geogre: I think also they object to any notion that “morality” is “natural,” they believe morality is supernatural, it comes from God and only from God. If this “McCarthy” is in fact a Mick, then he’s likely to be Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholics who have been trained by jesuit scholasticists will argue you to death, literally, until you die of a tautology overdose, if you suggest to them that morality has any “natural” (biological, evolutionary) basis.
Oblios Cap: It cannot be improved upon.
For screwy writing, fallacies, and a big phallus at a keyboard, Bill Donohue’s original op/ed is a staggering monument:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/10/secular_saboteurs.html
May I just say this is a fabulous thread that helps me remember that there are intelligent people out there in the ether (great review, btw). Thank you for the sanity check.
Love this:
“This book is full so full of horror, failure, and tears-of-an-eagle kitsch that we should build a mosque over it.”
It’s books like this that remind me that Amazon’s rating system is the absolute pinnacle of dumbfuckery.
The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America
***** Everyone should read this book; it will protect you from Sharia Law and the very sight of it makes Marxists shrivel up and turn into tax cuts and FREEDOM. An instant classic!
Shakespeare: Collected Works
** THIS SHIT IS WRITTEN IN SOME FOREIGN HOMO LANGUAGE AND RIPS OFF THE PLOTS OF SOME GOOD TV SHOWS AND OTHELLO IS A MUSLIM TERRORIST.
SayItWithWookies: And sadly, some numbskull is reading this garbage and is currently working on a remote controlled detonator in his Mom’s basement/Double-Wide trailer looking to take back America from the Socialists.
bureaucrap: Curiously enough, I’m pretty sure it involves exploding bombs at buildings. So, basically.
All douchebags are created equal, but some douchebags are more equal than others.
SmutBoffin: Amazon, and NY Times Bestseller List, have other problems. I mean if all these conservobooks keep flying off the shelves, why do all the authors involved invariably choose to keep their humiliating day jobs? I mean if I were making literally millions per book I pooped out, I sure as shit would not continue to maintain some hack blog or beat my pud in front of a microphone for 3 hours a day + preparation time (to rehearse the “listener” phone calls). Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.
Originally envisioned as a place where you could read defenses of Joseph McCarthy and Francisco Franco while sipping a sparkling Negroni, National Review today is …
How times have changed. These days sipping on a sparkling Negroni will cost you $20.
Or so I’ve been told.
Mr Blifil: These conservative anti-thinkers believe that the adulation of million of idiots is better than the praise of a single thoughtful person. Instead of spending a lifetime doing thankless, accurate scholarship, they want the instant satisfaction that comes from stirring up the Masses Who Are Asses.
This way leads to the Dark Side.
Rousseau just wanted life to go back to those simpler times, like in the 50’s. A man could just tend his garden, go hunting, enjoy the good company of his family, worship his God and be a pure-of-heart conservative. Back in the 1450’s.
Prommie: You know, Swift said that Jack (the radical protestants) began to resemble Peter (the Catholics), in A Tale of a Tub, and this is one of those areas. The fire pissin’ conservatards are also “evangelicals,” and they need “sin nature” — which is their version of the total depravity of man.
It isn’t merely that morality comes from supernatural sources, which I agree with as a point of definition (morality is derived from a belief in a power greater than man, whether that power is real or not and whether that power is Zeus or the volcano or a revealed religion), but they want man to be inherently vicious except when redeemed and then completely forgiven. Not good, just infallible. Now, you might wonder how that’s possible — how a person could be bad and infallible — but then you’d be “arguing works,” and that’s not allowed. Thus it is that a person can go ahead and cheat, lie, and steal but be forgiven in advance. The Catholics, they say, worry about deeds, and that makes them all sinners who are going straight to hell.
Four hundred sixty four pages! I just feel terribly sorry for the trees that had to be pulped to produce this crap.
jodyleek: After the previous book review I went over to Amazon to find some horrifying piece of radioactive crap for poor Greer to read - as hard as I tried, I could not find anything written by Michele Bachmann. At least she has that going for her.
My suggestion for the next book project: Midge Decter’s rim-jobbing hagiography of Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a few years old now, but this sort of thing lives forever, just like syphilis and strontium-238.
I used to tell my children that all books should be treated with respect, even if we don’t agree with the ideas they contain. Clearly some books are wasted paper, however, and are best used for wiping one’s ass and starting fires.
mumblyjoe: “… right-wingers hate all enlightenment philosophers except for … Locke…”
They also likey-like teh Adam Smith and “the invisible masturbating hand.”
“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.” - Adam Smith
Say what?
Lascauxcaveman:It was the best of all possible worlds.
He also penned How the Obama Administration has Politicized Justice which thankfully did not occur under the previous administration.
Wow, I’ve seen better constructed sentences during a game of boggle.
Can you buy stock in the idiot industry?