Wednesday, May 02, 2012
SHORTER BYRON YORK: Romney aide Richard Grenell was not forced out by social conservatives. He wasn't really even an aide. Rather, he is a radical homosexual activist who won the trust of the Romney campaign, then attacked it from within as a gay suicide bomber.
7:18 AM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, May 01, 2012
HIP TO BE SQUARE. I mentioned in my most recent Voice column Jonah Goldberg's typically incisive response to the whole alleged issue of Obama being too cool:
I wish the ad had at least one or two really solid clips conveying how despearately Obama wants to seem cool, which is always the great coolness-killer. It would have helped set the tone of the ad much better. What would those clips be? I'm not sure, but then again I'm not making the ad. Michael Moore seems to find a way to find that kind of footage pretty easily, and I have no doubt it can be found in Obama's case.
If only we had a picture of him with poop in his pants, holding a commie flag, everyone'd know what a poopy-pants commie he is! Faart. Yet it appears someone took not only this ridiculous subject but also Goldberg's thinly-veiled bleg seriously. At her internet Sunday school, The Anchoress prowls the aisles with a metal ruler and tells you what's cool and what isn't:
Have you heard the news? Barack Obama is cool!
He’s not just cool, he’s way cool; the coolest thing ever!
Too bad she forgot to link to a citation; I'd love to know what idiot said that.
Never having been “cool” myself (or desperate enough to seek its conferral upon me by people I always found to be rather sad trend-followers)...
While you so-called cool kids were friggin' and frugin' in your discos, The Anch was pretending to be a nun. That's totally Goth!
Coolness does not need anyone to define it, but allow me to try.
How much time we would save if only The Anchoress could occasionally remember the thing she said just before the thing she said.
The quality of “coolness” contains within it an attitude of discrete detachment, which is not the same as aloofness. It suggests an intellect attuned to a different frequency—perhaps to a higher muse—but still comfortable sharing the ground with the rest of us. Its muted confidence is so supreme...
On and on goes Sister Malizia's cool lesson, and just as the boys and girls are about to nod off she pulls out the visuals:
Come to think of it, by these definitions, one could safely opine that the “coolest” leaders currently athwart the world’s stage are still England’s Queen Elizabeth II, who recently crashed a wedding simply to wish a bridal couple well, and His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who takes the daily piñata beatings that come his way in stride, and answers with a blessing.
Somehow I don't think this will get the kids to throw in their porkpie hats for mitres and crowns, much as I would enjoy that.
Meanwhile Ole Perfesser Instapundit uses reader mail to explain how uncool Obama really is:
My theory is Obama represents the supremacy (however short-lived) of the beta-male. The only people who think he’s a hep-cat are hipster betas and 60′s radical-nostalgia dopes (also perennial personal-risk-averse betas who never did anything bold on their own). It’s all projection, much like the rest of the way that demographic operates
The thing about the "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members" attitude is, it's more impressive when Groucho Marx says it than when some guy who writes letters to Instapundit says it.
How hard this all is for them -- because once upon a time, they were cool. Back in the 1980s Reagan was everyone's daddy, John Paul II did a world tour and danced with the kids, and everyone dressed and wanted to be like characters from Dynasty. Fashions fade, though, and you're left with the enduring values behind what made your heroes cool. In their case that's tax breaks for the rich, endless wars, and persecution of homosexuals. We already had a retro revival of that:
I'm not sure the time is right for another. But who knows? Show biz is tricky.
UPDATE. "Weren't these the same guys who insisted that George Bush calling people 'Stretch' and 'Pooty-poot' was a veritable laff riot?" asks Doghouse Riley in comments. mortimer reminds us that Lisa Schiffren wrote "an entire, very wet column" in the Wall Street Journal about how "she and her soccer mom friends" found Bush "'hot' as in virile, sexy and powerful." Not to mention proto-Anchoress Peggy Noonan's swoon over both the President's testicles. Chacun à son ghoul.
10:47 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, April 30, 2012
WHAT THEY REALLY WANT.
The conservative vision of the future is the 19th Century, only with sound cannons.
See also.
10:48 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, April 29, 2012
NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger tsuris over Obama's busy media week, including the Bin Laden ad, the Jimmy Fallon slow jam, and the White House Correspondents Dinner. I left out anything concerning their claims that Obama's dog-eating joke at the nerdprom meant that conservatives scored a great victory, not because they aren't ridiculous, but because I'm just sick to death of Treacher.
10:18 PM by roy edroso
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SHORTER MICHAEL POTEMRA: Catholics are embracing same-sex marriage; the polls say so. But Catholics also are turning against Obama; Glenn Beck says so. This is good news for Republicans.
UPDATE. In a follow-up, Potemra adds a new proof-point: a Times poll showing that Americans don't think "religiously affiliated institutions should have to cover the full birth-control costs in their insurance plans." But the Administration is not making them, and is in fact going to ridiculous lengths to appease such organizations, the bishops' disingenuousness notwithstanding.
2:25 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, April 26, 2012
GET YOUR WAR ON, AGAIN. Sonny Bunch reads about the Obama Administration's "creation of an Atrocity Prevention Board, an interagency mechanism that calls for a new means of preventing mass atrocities and genocides," and is moved to sarcasm:
Wow! Such strength! Such fearless vision! I do hope the board shakes their magnificent finger VERY HARD at this: Then he tells us about a Syrian guy who got buried alive at gunpoint. Or was he shredded in a shredder -- no, my mistake, that was from the Iraq War prep. Still, even if this one happens not to pan out (and the Daily Mail, from which the story is taken, suggests it may not), there are undoubtedly plenty of real horror stories in Syria to make your blood boil. Bunch doesn't wait for those:
But hey, we’re totally going to sanction those bastards into the ground, right? Right?... I guess not. Welcome to a Brave New World of American Impotence. But hey! At least we’ve got that prevention board manning the walls, keeping the world’s vulnerable populations safe from atrocities!
If you thought this kind of gung-hodaddiness went out with warblogging, it's only because you haven't been listening to Fox News:
“In Syria,” Krauthammer continued, “we have been watching for a year something that isn’t hypothetical. It’s not happening in the future. It’s happening now — 11,000 dead in front of our eyes; the indiscriminate shelling of cities. [Obama] hasn’t lifted a finger. He gives a lot of good speeches... “And what did he announce today at the Holocaust Museum?’ Krauthammer said. “He would be establishing an Atrocities Prevention Board. Now imagine that. The Russians are supplying plane-loads of weapons every day. The Iranians are supplying weaponry and financiers and trainers... Well, this really is going to make a difference. I mean, it’s embarrassing.”
Or reading Commentary, and that reliable action fan Max Boot:
Barring greater action led by the U.S., Assad will remain in power. And I fear that the U.S. may not do anything serious until after the November presidential election. Unfortunately, the way things are going, the killing will still be in full swing then. Or attending the speeches of potential Republican Vice-Presidential candidates:
Potential Republican vice presidential candidate Marco Rubio said Wednesday that a unilateral "military solution" from the United States may be needed to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb... Rubio, 40, noted how Washington should be prepared to bypass the United Nations when "bad actors" prevent the global body from taking meaningful steps, such as on Syria. "The Security Council remains a valuable forum, but not an indispensable one," he said. "We can't walk away from a problem because some members of the Security Council refuse to act."
While agreeing with Obama that "global problems do require international coalitions," Rubio reminded the president that "effective international coalitions don't form themselves," but need to be instigated and led by the US. "And that is what this administration doesn't understand." When you hear them talk about "distractions," just remember that there's no distraction like Americans fighting in a foreign war, and it's the only one they've got left that will work.
5:24 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, April 25, 2012
SHORTER ENTIRE RIGHT-WING BLOGOSPHERE: Obama is sending his coloreds to kill us!
Ace of Spades cites three (3) crimes in which black people attacked white people, and cries, "No national coverage of this racial hate crime pattern in the media." The population of the United States is 311,591,917.
What was it the Crazy Jesus Lady said the other day about aggregating isolated stories? You can get a lot of propaganda value out of that shtick so long as you're only talking to people who are down with your program [play snippet from Theme from "Deliverance" here] and primed to accept that your tiny sample gives an accurate picture of the world. But what does it say about these guys that this is the picture they want to paint?
Worse, in a way: What does it say about the voters they hope to attract with it? Run this racist horseshit by normal people, and the older ones will marvel that anybody still thinks that way and the younger ones will just marvel. But their target consumer will nod ruefully and sigh over the race-treason he's seen going on all around him ever since they started letting those people on American Bandstand. Now, by God, maybe people will see the truth!
Speaking of neo-Confederates, I see Ole Perfesser Instapundit is trying, via a reader write-in, a familiar variation on this hooey:
Don’t be surprised if, as Obama’s fortunes wane, incidents like those of Mobile are insinuated to be a future consequence of his electoral defeat...
Readers may recall that they tried this in the last ditch in 2008 -- telling people that black people were prepared to riot if Obama lost, presumably on the secret orders of the HNIC himself.
Think it'll work this time?
UPDATE. In comments, Mr. Leonard Pierce performs the standard recommended test for such accusations of media "silence" as Ace has made: Put the relevant names into Google News. CBS, ABC, CNN, AP, UPI, Huffington Post, Gawker... all these Lame Stream Media outlets covered these crimes up by actually reporting them.
There's also some discussion, launched by DocAmazing, of how in the rightwing imagination "Those People can simultaneously be shiftless and well-organized, lazy and filled with violent energy, uneducable and politically savvy..." The Other is mentioned, but I think it has more to do with the logic and characterization standards of WWE and old comic books.
8:30 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, April 23, 2012
SHORTER CRAZY JESUS LADY: We are at the mercy of Negroes and champagne-swilling government bureaucrats, and it's all the fault of Casual Fridays.
UPDATE. Give Noonan credit for showing how the game is played:
In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they?
Similarly, if we stuck three of her columns onto a psych intake form, we could probably get her committed.
10:40 AM by roy edroso
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