Author: Thers

Lawyer and National Review writer Shannen W. Coffin is Fed Up with oppressive governmental intrusions upon his Liberty, such as his inability to buy toxic pajamas for his children and the fact that he has to pick up after his dog after it takes a crap. He’s pretty upset, saying “you don’t have to be Ted Kaczynski to feel just a little overwhelmed.” Yikes!

Clearly, Coffin needs some perspective, stat, before the cop who tickets him for leaving dogshit all over the sidewalk gets a pipe bomb in his mailbox. To this end we shall borrow the humorous premise of the classic and not at all disturbing 1940 short A Case of Spring Fever, in which a man named Gilbert Willoughby learns that if you long for a world without springs, much to your sorrow, your wish will be granted by a demented animated spring-sprite named “Coily.” (No, really.) By the Power of the Internet, we hereby grant Coffin his wish: NO REGULATIONS! (Must be imagined in voice of Coily for Full Comedic Effect and Maximum Laffs.)

SCENE. The Coffin Household.

Bleary-eyed, I crawl out of bed, shuffle into the bathroom, and flip on the lights, but the bulb is out. I remind myself to get to Home Depot and stockpile a few cases of good, old-fashioned incandescent bulbs while I still can.

He has to flip the switch a few times to see if the problem is just that there’s no electricity, because maybe the Enron guys felt like sleeping in again. But then the light comes on — and the bulb explodes, burning off Coffin’s eyebrows. Houses don’t have to be wired to code, you know! NO REGULATIONS!

After my morning business, I flush an extra time, since 1.6 gallons just doesn’t seem to do the trick. But at least we’re saving water, huh? Hop in the shower, where the water trickles out at an EPA-limited 2.5 gallons per minute. I think I’ll stay in here for an extra ten minutes or so.

But of course the morning business bubbles up from the shower drain, because there’s no such thing as plumbing codes either! And it’s cheaper to have plumbing done by inexperienced immigrants who work for slave wages anyhow! Coffin leaps out of the tub, his bare feet caked with his own morning filth! NO REGULATIONS!

I walk out to get the morning paper and take out the trash. “Honey, make sure to put out the recycling, too.” Right. I hope we sorted this stuff correctly.

There’s no recycling — freedom! He’s eyebrowless and afflicted with stinkfoot, but maybe this no regulation thing will work out after all! But upon opening the front door Coffin is buried under a huge mountain of garbage. He pokes his head out of the trashpile with the inevitable comical banana peel dangling over his forehead: there’s no municipal sanitation department, and there’s no one to force the private garbage company from providing shitty service, because it’s a monopoly! NO REGULATIONS!

As I’m contemplating whether you can recycle pizza boxes, my dog fertilizes the lawn, so I go looking for a plastic bag (without holes).

Everyone is free to let their dogs poop everywhere, and so they do! And since everyone in this Brave Poo World is a Randian Objectivist, and since everybody who ever lost their marbles after reading Atlas Shrugged always assumed somebody else would be cleaning up the shit, the whole neighborhood is a fetid swamp of canine feces three feet deep! NO REGULATIONS!

I load my daughter into my fuel-inefficient SUV, asking myself how many hybrids the manufacturer had to make to offset the hit against Department of Transportation CAFE standards. She’s comfortably seated in her state-mandated booster seat.

The SUV immediately explodes because of a faulty fuel tank, spewing debris across the suburban pet-fecal hellscape that had been anyway poisoned because of leaded gasoline contamination! Still, beats having the government force you to do anything ridiculous, like keeping your kids from dying because they don’t have the correct car seats! I begin to suspect that the original is becoming too ludicrous to be amenable to satire! Anyhow, NO REGULATIONS!

With no time for a decent breakfast, we hop in the drive-through lane at McDonald’s. I wonder how they’re going to get all that nutrition information required by Obamacare on the drive-through menu. Or how I’m going to be able to read it. Not to worry, though — at least no insurance company can refuse to cover me for my high cholesterol now. Who says there is no such thing as a free breakfast?

That doesn’t even make any sense! Fast food places have been posting nutrition information long before Obama was president! And you’re a frickin’ DC lawyer and former Cheney apparatchik — you have insurance! But to continue the joke, you get yourself & your kid a nice Crack McMuffin and wash it down with McLaudanum Shakes to start your day — and it’s perfectly legal: remember, NO REGULATIONS!

When I get home that night, I lunge for the remote as the all-too-familiar Cialis ad is coming on. The kids don’t need to hear about side effects in excess of four hours. (Four hours? Really?)

This still happens because corporate capitalism still exists. Except… no FCC! You and your kids are now watching Bob & Liddy doing the nasty, perhaps wearing some sort of patriotic fetish gear! Freedom! NO REGULATIONS!

After sending them off to bed in their Consumer Product Safety Commission–compliant pajamas, I look at a stack of bills.

No more bills — hired goons just come to your house to beat the snot out of you once a month to collect on your Visa. And what are you gonna do about it? Also, all American children are dead because of Osh Kosh B’Gosh’s misguided foray into electric bathing footie pajama marketing! NO REGULATIONS!

Oh, and you’re a corporate lawyer…? No you’re not! Corporations just hire, say, Blackwater mercs to do what needs to be done. NO REGULATIONS!

Now, quit your bitching about having to take out the recycling like it means you’re worse off than the Russian peasants under Stalin, you great big geek of a baby, and go bore the daylights out of your horrible friends on the golf course about the wonders of trivial legislation, like a good little Gilbert Willoughby, won’t you?

 

A lot of people have trouble with Michael Medved’s mustache, calling it a “hateful & contemptible lip-douche.” They ask questions like, “what did that hideous sewer caterpillar ever do to you that  made you want to crucify it under your nose?” Myself, though, I approve of it. A mustache like that says to the world, “hello, world! I’m a sanctimonious prick, let me annoy you with my dipshit self-righteous opinions.” It’s a real time-saver, frankly.

Anyway. Medved has this emanation up at Townhall where he presents the case to the sullen, surly inmates that there are Key Differences between Canada and Nazi Germany, and that therefore Barack Obama is not “evil,” he just wants to do evil things that you shouldn’t call “evil” because that’s not nice, so let’s just politely agree that he deep down hates America, like all Leftists. It doesn’t make very much sense, but maybe if you stare at the mustache long enough, it will become clear.

Contrasting attitudes toward the United States of America characterize the great divide in this country between right and left, but the similarly crucial distinction between mainstream conservatives and right wing hysterics reflects their radically different assessments of… Canada, of all places. For the first time since the War of 1812, in fact, debate about the true nature of our terminally bland neighbor to the north plays a significant role in American politics.

Medved actually has sort of a point here. If Canada’s single payer healthcare system is not Tyranny but merely, you know, a policy enacted by a democratic state to handle an important public issue, then pretty much all of the Teabagging drama suddenly becomes so much abject hysterical bullshit. Which it is! Medved is significantly aware of consensus reality to concede this basic point, stressing that a healthcare system like Canada’s is not inherently “evil,” and hence neither is Obama for wanting something like that (which he in fact does not, but leave that be for a moment).

The idea that neither the president nor single-payer are “evil” has the entirely predictably hilarious Townhall comments results:

It is freedom and the exceptionalism of the United States citizens that kicked the tories out of the US after the Revolution and moved them to Canada. The woosies have been building a nanny state ever since. I would argue that the reason they are less repressive then their elite lefties would like is the long boarder with the much larger and more dynamic US has kept them from totally smothering the Canadian people’s desire for freedom.

No doubt. But I’m more interested in the wingnut honey that Medved feels impelled to coat his post with, so as to make the bitter pill of ludicrously obvious fact (Canada is not Maoist China) easier for the crazies to swallow (not that they didn’t spit it out anyhow). To wit, Medved quotes this nonsense from Norman Poohoreitz:

I think it fair to say that what the Left mainly sees when it looks at America is injustice and oppression of every kind – economic, social, and political. By sharp contrast, the Right sees a complex of traditions, principles, and institutions that have made it possible for more freedom – and even factoring in periodic economic downturns – more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society known to human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending against attack.

Bullshit. What the Right “sees” when it “looks at America” is that it is infested with Evil-doers who are so twisted with hate for Uncle Sam that they want insurance companies to not be able to refuse to cover sick kids. Or something.

The American Right is nothing without its demonization of an imaginary “Left.” As I’ve said before, imagine how freaked out these guys would be be if the American left actually had any influence on policy in this country. Horrors!

 

I have my issues with Obama & the Democratic Party, but the idea that the 2008 election was illegitimate is not one of them. Like it or not, Obama and the House and Senate Democrats won in ‘08, and that means that they get to run the country. It’s the system we have. This ought not to be a particularly difficult concept to grasp. Oh, hello, Mark Steyn.

Ever since this health care “debate” got going, I’ve worried that American conservatives underestimate the ability of Big Government to transform the character of a people. After all, the Euro-weenies weren’t always Euro-weenies – else how would they have conquered the entire planet?

In the good old days it was kicking the crap out of the coolies abroad and the yobbos at home. Now it’s all free healthcare! Boo! Violent assault upon the lesser races? Huzzah! Your own citizens going to the doctor? TYRANNY!

Whatever. For what Steyn calls a cheerier take, though, there’s this, from some make-pretend academic on the wingnut gravy train:

If the program passed in the House of Representatives on March 21st and signed into law thirty-six hours thereafter is fully implemented and left in place for any considerable length of time, it will complete the project begun by the Progressives when they first took control of the federal government in 1912. We will, as Mark argues, be indistinguishable from the Canadians and the Europeans; our character as a people will change; we will be transformed into subjects and wards of the state, and we will no longer be citizens; our economy will stagnate; and we will have neither the resolve nor the resources with which to defend our country and its way of life. If we acquiesce, we really are doomed.

This is what gives me hope. For we are not yet a people apt to acquiesce in dictates handed down by our lords and masters. When Britain and Canada drifted into socialism, there were no tea parties spontaneously formed by ordinary citizens to buck the trend. The British and the Canadians lacked the spirit of resistance – though, to be fair, it lived on in the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

This is horseshit for a number of reasons. For openers, for most of this past low dishonest decade (shit, century) it wasn’t exactly the progressives in charge, and if you don’t want to say the economy “stagnated,” that’s because you’re too polite to say it “got flushed down the shitter.” Beyond that, the country isn’t even run by progressives now.

But what kills me is the idea that Britain and Canada are the totalitarian hellscapes that they are today because of evil Usurpers. Uh, they got and keep better healthcare systems than ours because of democracy.

Heck, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s what our “conservative” friends are really afraid of, with their hyperventilating over an impractically centrist healthcare reform. Could be!

 

A startling revelation from that World-Renowned scholar,  J. Goldberg, Pt.Ld.

This combination of state power and murderous, genocidal intent is nowhere on display in America today, not in the Obama administration (contrary to what some overheated right-wingers claim) and certainly not among out-of-power conservatives and “tea partiers.”

Well, that’s a relief. And it’s best not to be confused on this point. Dr. Goldberg has, you’ll recall, assured us at some certain length (specifically, interminable) that Liberals are Fascists. But, you see, they are nice fascists, of the sort that don’t do what historical fascists most liked to do, namely, beat the everliving shit out of people they don’t like. To be sure, that doesn’t mean they’re not fascists, a term Goldberg specifically uses because he is, uh, opposed to name-calling. But still, gosh, genocidal intent! Obama? How ludicrous and absurd and ludicrous! How vulgar. Judicious Scholars such as the Reasonable Conservative J. Goldberg would never dare suggest such a thing…

(If you don’t already know where this is headed, welcome, new readers.)

For the Truly Enlightened, the precise sense in which Obama is a fascist is, according to an older, presumably less “evolved” Goldberg, or in other words a Goldberg of last summer, not that sense in which Obama has genocidal intent, heh, but, er, that sense in which his intent is genocidal:

From the LA Times:

Reporting from Washington — President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.

In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don’t unthinkingly approve “additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care.”

He added: “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

There’s an interesting contradiction here. According to the pro-choice perspective, it’s outrageous for the state to interfere in a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy. But it’s pragmatic and reasonable for the state to consider terminating a person, if some money can be saved.

This logic is nothing new.

The final link, and you could see this coming down Broadway with its fly open blaring a tuba and rocking a clown nose…  is a Wikipedia Final Solution link.

Goldberg has a powerful expressive interest in whipping up the crazy, but is terribly afraid of being called on it because then he just looks like a clown, and he desperately wants to be Taken Seriously.

Douche.

 

I hope I have never given the impression that I am a nice person. I am in fact as it emerges and happens a shadowy figure with a tantalizingly enigmatic past about whom hangs an aura of tantalizingly enigmatic mystery — and Danger! Yummy Danger! What I mean is, chicks dig me. With spades.

Or, to be more precise, Jonah Goldberg is a tool — the Ace of Shits. We’re going to read now, you and I, a Jonah Goldberg column, like a mental patient etherized upon a table, as an act of loudly demanded mercy.

As a reminder, the person responsible for the following comical snark is Jonah Fucking Goldberg.

During the 2004 Democratic convention I was on a train heading to Boston’s Fleet Center. While straining to contain my excitement over the prospect of hearing presidential nominee John Kerry’s soaring oratory (and seeing vice presidential candidate John Edwards’ hair), I was distracted by a woman standing in front of me. She was part of a big group of very excited Democrats, convinced that their man was going to lift the dark, evil cloud that hung over George Bush’s America like the shadow of Sauron over Mordor. It was, of course, not to be. It turned out that the Human Toothache and the Silky Pony were not what the American people were looking for in 2004.

Well, they actually came pretty close. But that’s neither here nor there, Mr Doughy Pantload.

Kerry did not get clobbered — he lost, but his candidacy was not a joke.

But, like, what on earth makes Jonah Goldberg confident that he is more likable, more clever, and less grating than, say, John Kerry? Or a razor blade strapped under an eyelid?

Or, in shorts, what makes Jonah Goldberg think he does not chafe?

Goldberg goes on to say that Marcy Wheeler is very excited about how Obama is handling Terror Suspects. Exactly.

Anyhow, Goldberg is a fucking idiot. Look, what really annoyed us back in the day was not so much the Patriot Act, which nobody liked, but still. The point is that nobody took to the streets over the Patriot Act. Over the war, yes.

But then, here is Goldberg:

Better to be a called a crackpot than be one, I say.

In other words, when you have a Republican president encouraging a pointlessly violent and fiscally mysterious war, cool!

 

Whatever one thinks of the Health Care Reform that just passed in the House, one thing is clear: you can’t possibly say anything about it more brain-chewingly stupid than what they’re saying over at Townhall.

Ben Shapiro, for instance. Over the years we have watched the Virgin Ben grow and mature: time was, he was just a twit, but now the Ivy League and Bitter Experience have turned him into a twerp. Why, Ben has pulled himself up by his own Garanimals! And the resulting wedgie has constricted his internal oxygen flow sufficiently so that he can claim that the big problem with healthcare reform is that it forces Americans at gunpoint to surrender their paychecks to obese women who make money by eating food on the internet. (No, he says that.) Because, remember, every single person who has ever gotten sick or hurt? It’s their own damn fault, and they should be mercilessly culled from the herd. For the herd should only be comprised of such impressive specimens as, uh, Ben Shapiro… ahem.

But Ben isn’t even as comical as Tony Blankley, who contends that Health Care Reform is exactly the same thing as the Nazi conquest of France. Which, you know, it’s not. But if conservatives can’t dig up Churchill’s corpse and fling it about, what fun can they have?

But then we have Dennis Prager, who reliably brings the crazy:

Thank God this civil war is non-violent. But the fact is that the left and the rest of the country share almost no values. The American value system and the leftist value system are irreconcilable. If the left wins, America’s values lose. If American values prevail, the left loses.

Those who throw around Civil War metaphors like that ought to remember that they are, as it happens, the Confederacy.

Anyhow, jeez, if these clowns are driven this goofy now, imagine if the legislation actually were, like, leftist. One shudders to imagine the reaction… ah, hell, it would be the same damn thing. They just like yelling.

 

It was quite the spectacle in DC today, as the Tea-Baggers descended upon the capitol in order to protest “socialism” being rammed down their throats. Presumably they prefer instead things that are dangled. A very excited but characteristically confused Jim Hoft squeals delightedly that the Tea-Bag rally numbered 100,000 souls, and to prove it, links to a Fox News story saying that the crowd topped out at 25,000. Of course Fox’s source was none other than Michele Bachmann, so who knows. Later, Hoft scaled back his estimate to 30,000, and complained that the anti-war demonstrations a few years ago in DC got loads of positive media, even though in his world, the anti-war demonstrations never made it past the “thousands” mark. Like I said, he’s deeply confused.

Hoft also proudly shows us some fascinating pictures of a Tea-Bag rally outside Russ Carnahan’s St. Louis office, where protesters set fire to Carnahan’s picture, threw shoes at his picture, and threatened him with tar-and-feathering. Meanwhile, back in the Capitol, Tea-Bagger patriots were calling for gun violence as a response to the passage of healthcare legislation they don’t like, and also calling Barney Frank a “faggot” and Andre Carson and John Lewis “niggers.” And also this happened:

After that incident, Capitol police threatened to expel the protesters from the building, but were outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed. Tea party protesters equipped with high-end video cameras were summoned to film the encounter and the officers ultimately relented.

I will remind you that, as per Jonah Goldberg, the people closest to acting like fascists nowadays are Wellseley-educated elementary school teachers. I will also remind you that the official police response to protesters during the 2004 GOP convention in NYC was rather different.

To his credit, Tim Ryan denounced the epithet-hurling. (Hilariously, Ryan actually uses the term “tea-bagger” protesters.)

 

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, and so forth. In the USA this holy day is fraught with pious religious significance, in the sense that tomorrow morning a lot of people will be throwing up into green plastic hats. In Ireland, apparently it has become traditional to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by getting fucked up on bath salts. No, really.

… “bath salts” are popular these days throughout Ireland, not for a relaxing soak at home but because many contain a party drug known as mephedrone. They’re part of the literally dizzying array of products being sold in stores offering customers cheap and legal highs, stuff marketed as bath salts or incense but designed to be smoked, snorted or swallowed.

The new-wave head shops are fast becoming a fixture in this island nation, multiplying with astonishing speed from just a few several years ago to as many as 100 today. Much of the growth has occurred in the last 12 months, even as the rest of the Irish economy underwent a painful contraction.

And fair enough. I distinctly remember one very memorable St. Patrick’s Day when my wife experienced a painful contraction and loudly demanded drugs. (Our youngest turned four today — yes, his birthday really is March 17.)

In the absence of bath salts, St. Patrick’s Day news from Ireland is grim, as the inexorable and seemingly interminable horror of the Irish Catholic Church’s child abuse and child rape scandal engulfs the primate, Cardinal Sean Brady.

CARDINAL SEÁN Brady has apologised again for his handling of complaints against child abuser Fr Brendan Smyth and expressed shame that he has not always upheld the values that he professes and believes in….

In his homily during Mass yesterday morning at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, Cardinal Brady said: “This week a painful episode from my own past has come before me. I have listened to reaction from people to my role in events 35 years ago. I want to say to anyone who has been hurt by any failure on my part that I apologise to you with all my heart.”

Cardinal Brady conducted canonical inquiries into allegations of child sex abuse by Smyth 35 years ago, involving two young people, without reporting the allegations to civil authorities.

For those who don’t know, “Fr Brendan Smyth” in Ireland is about as bad as it gets. The Smyth affair brought down a government and was a national Irish trauma… in 1994. 16 years ago.

When you’re Irish, you get used to the idea of waiting for justice. No matter how long it takes. I hope, for the sake of the victims, they live to see it. But I doubt anyone’s holding their breath.

 

The Vatican, today.

The pope’s spokesman has launched a vigorous counter-attack against a report linking Benedict XVI to a sex abuse cover-up while he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1981.

Father Federico Lombardi appeared to suggest in an interview on Vatican Radio that the pope, who also has strong links to the city of Regensburg, was the victim of a plot.

“It’s rather clear that in recent days there have been people who have searched – with notable tenacity – in Regensburg and Munich for elements to personally involve the holy father in the question of the abuses,” Lombardi said. “To any objective observer it’s clear that these attempts have failed.”

These comments refer to this:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.

The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said he had no comment beyond the statement by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, which he said showed the “nonresponsibility” of the pope in the matter.

Of course, just last month,

Pope Benedict XVI gave the bishops of the Irish Catholic church a public dressing down at the Vatican today over the “heinous” child abuse scandal that has capsized the church’s moral authority in Ireland….

Before the crisis meeting, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, had called on clergy who had abused children to admit to their “abominable acts” in a scandal that threatened to sink the church in Ireland. He told the bishops: “The most dangerous storm is that which touches the heart of believers, shaking their faith and threatening their capacity to entrust themselves to God.”

Taking “nonresponsibility,” blaming direct subordinates, saying it’s all a wicked plot, telling other people to do what you won’t do yourself: I guess they don’t miss a trick over there in the 21st century Vatican.

Remember,

“What is at stake, and at great risk, is Benedict’s central project for the ‘re-Christianization’ of Christendom, his desire to have Europe return to its Christian roots,” said David Gibson, the author of a biography of Benedict and a religion commentator for Politicsdaily.com. “But if the root itself is seen as rotten, then his influence will be badly compromised.”

You don’t say.

See also.

Tags: Catholic Curch, Child abuse, Pope, Vatican

 

I’ve not seen The Blind Side, for which I understand Sandra Bullock received an Academy Reward. The advertising for the movie emphasized that it was a Heartwarming Tale of Human Perseverance, and I hate that shit on principle.

Beyond that it seemed to be intended as popular entertainment designed to make white people feel better about themselves qua white people, something that’s never an especially edifying spectacle, and indeed a notoriously vulgar cliche. Don’t get me wrong; many of my best friends (and immediate family and ahem myself) are white, and they are quite lovely folks when they haven’t had too much whiskey, which is often. Sometimes. Occasionally. What I’m saying about The Blind Side, I mean, is that while it’s entirely possible that this review is wrong and I’ll think otherwise after I watch it, I calculate the odds of that being the case as about as low as me ever bothering to rent The Blind Side to find out, which I will never do, as the best case scenario is the film is a Heartwarming Tale of Human Perseverance, and life’s too damn short, you know?

But I will anyhow draw your attention to this nonsense from noted cretin Ben Shapiro over at Townhall, a specimen who doesn’t yet qualify as a twerp because his balls are as yet non-descended. Why am I drawing your attention to this garbage? Because you’ve probably done something bad lately and deserve it.

On Sunday night, Sandra Bullock won Best Actress at the 82nd Academy Awards for her portrayal of gun-toting Republican Leigh Anne Tuohy in “The Blind Side”….

Leave it to the gals on “The View” to tear apart this heartwarming story. Vanessa Williams, sitting in for Whoopi Goldberg, trashed the film, even though she’d never seen it. Williams said: “It brings up a theme for black folks of ‘OK, here’s another white family that has saved the day.’ Another black story that has to have a white person come in and lift them up. And I’m not saying it’s not true and it didn’t happen, it’s one of those ‘do I really want to save the same theme again?’” Joy Behar, the ugly liberal harridan who thinks genital jokes demonstrate extraordinary wit, quickly sided with Williams.

Shapiro is going to soon inform us that It Is Liberals Are the Real Racists, etc. As is usual for this genre, though, he forgets for the moment that he needs to hide the misogyny: gals? Harridan? And what’s wrong with genital jokes (see above)? Are they worse than, say, poop jokes? Ben? “An Inconvenient Truth is perhaps the worst thing ever put on film; it’s as though Satan had explosive diarrhea on camera, and then the diarrhea talked at you for two hours.” Well, Ben is a youngster — in Freudian terms, he’s still at the backdoor stage developmentally, and hasn’t yet discovered the joys of his wee wee.

But to the point:

Somehow liberals get away with detritus like this on a regular basis. If someone voiced moral doubt about a movie depicting a black family adopting a white child, they’d be raked over the coals — and rightfully so. Transracial adoption should be seen as the greatest hallmark of the tremendous racial acceptance that now dominates our culture. But extreme liberals — and black extreme liberals in particular — can get away with bashing transracial adoption because they rely on the lexicon of political correctness, which suggests that “cultural autonomy” is threatened by such adoptions.

Of course, Williams wasn’t talking about interracial adoption, she was talking about movie cliches. Like the one that does not exist about a black family adopting a white child, which has appeared over and over, meaning never, in no major movies or TV shows anyone can easily remember. Or, mostly, in real life, either, and when it does, there are, you know, issues.

Because, as it emerges, just-so heartwarming stories about the realities of race in America are even less persuasive in wingnut apologias than they are in big budget Hollywood productions.

 

Oh look, a squabble between Jonah Goldberg and David Brooks, a Hi-Powered Titanic Intellectual Clash that offers all the fast-paced drama of a kickboxing match between the Michelin Man and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. How exciting! What compelling, wily antagonists: David Brooks believes, incorrectly, that he is a sociologist; Jonah Goldberg believes, in his case correctly, that his silly book has made an Important Contribution to Serious Scholarship. (True story. It’s reminded Serious Scholars that when right wing dingbats like Jonah Goldberg write books, they’re full of mendacious halfwit crap.)

Goldberg huffs and puffs and blows his ass round because Brooks said that “There are many differences between the New Left and the Tea Partiers…. But the similarities are more striking than the differences.” This is typical airhead punditry — “admire my striking thesis that sounds profound if we all agree not to think about it,” and it’s pretty transparently designed to bolster the pretense that there exists such a thing as Thoughtful Conservatism as distinguishable from the incoherent loutishness of the Tea Baggers, and that therefore David Brooks still deserves to get paid and go on NPR to spout incoherent airhead punditry.

Anyway, Brooks says this grass-roots, spontaneously arising movement of ordinary folks and Beltway Outsiders like, for instance, Dick Armey, is tactically inspired by Saul Alinsky. He offers as evidence for this contention the fact that according to the “software” of Amazon Dot Com, “the same people who are buying Alinsky’s book ‘Rules for Radicals’” are:

also buying books like “Liberal Fascism,” “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” and “The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.” Those last two books were written by David Horowitz, who was a leading New Left polemicist in the 1960s and is now a leading polemicist on the right.

Or, in other words, the people most interested in Alinsky’s book right now are the kind of people who take Dick Armey’s book recommendations seriously, namely, the class of dopes who pay money for things written by clowns like Jonah Goldberg who like to sound smart but wisely choose to give peer review an extremely wide berth. This of course doesn’t prove there are Key Similarities between the New Left and the Tea Baggers; it proves that Tea Baggers like opening up their wallets for frauds, but we already knew that.

Goldberg, however, draws a different conclusion, based upon a comical assertion that the Alinsky buyers are just plain Objective Intellectually Inquisitive, something he knows because they also bought pseudo-smart wingnut welfare books by geniuses like Hoover Institoot shyster Thomas Sowell and Hillsdale College’s RJ Pestritto — Goldberg calls his book on progressivism “excellent and purely academic,” which is exactly what Glenn Beck thinks of it also. So you know it’s Disinterested Scholarship!

But the most fantastic bit of Goldberg’s post is this:

The Tea Partiers are not in any meaningful sense Rousseauians. They certainly don’t reject original sin in any serious way.  And I suspect if you asked many of them they would say that the American people deserve their share of blame for the financial mess we’re in. They do believe, I would bet, that America is a basically decent nation that has drifted into a kind of soft-despotism or Nanny-statism.   But that vision isn’t Rousseauian, it’s  De Tocquevillian.

Actually, it’s deeply confused ancient hoary paranoid silliness, but whatever. The point is, Goldberg is just smart enough to know that he gets paid and fed for telling the suckers flattering nonsense like their sincere belief that Barack Obama is a dangerous  hippie is not in fact crazy bullshit, but rather De Tocquevillian. David Brooks on the other hand just has to pretend it’s the rubes who’re the real hippies and non-true-conservatives. Either way, it’s a pretty sweet gig, as long as you can always remember to never, ever, know what you’re talking about.

 

How pleasing! According to one of  Ole Yeller’s Big Stupid Web-Sites,  a “comedy rap video slams Obama,” and it goes about as well as you’d expect from a “rap song” put together by young white conservatives– one of whom, as SEK points out, was responsible for this amusing World Nut Daily video about how Uganda is right to execute homosexuals. Jesse Taylor looks at this new “comedy rap video” and finds the comedy very funny, as does Spencer, who is especially tickled at how the tune

repeatedly addresses the first black president as “boy”; has a lyric in which a rapper imagining herself as a soldier in Iraq declares herself “sick of smelling like a mosque after Ramadan”; and then features a birther talking about how Obama isn’t an American.

And indeed, Mister Molotov is quite the specimen. Here’s a page with all of his Comedy Classics — each of which is preceded with an advertisement featuring the young woman who does the “boy” chorus in the video, pitching a DVD which you can buy if you are the sort of person who believes Obama was born in Kenya but worries that “your friends will think you’re crazy” if you say so out loud. I am not making that up.

One of the fascinating (from a forensic perspective) episodes of the recent CPAC Cavalcade of Kooky was the nut-to-nut confrontation between World Nut Daily’s Joseph Farah and Big Stupid Screechy Andy Breitbart, specifically over the Obama Birther stuff. That all has become even more fascinating — because here we have a Big Stupid Website promoting a “comedy rap video,” introduced by a professional black conservative, who is also, by the way, a person capable of saying things like ” a lot of liberals aren’t into sports and have disdain for organized competition,” which shows you how much contempt the man has for himself and how willing he is to sing stupid cliches for his supper.

Because, you know, there is nothing especially “comic” about this “comedy” in this “comedy rap video.” The “performers” believe every single stupid word they utter, and to be blunt, it escapes me how this attempt to mimic the a particular form of cultural production isn’t anything but updated blackface minstrel cakewalking bullshit. Only more incompetent.

Oh, and the comments thread to the Big Stupid post is priceless. Some scattered gems:

OMG….WTF….OTP….Kicked butt in the last minute and a half. There is HOPE for the American youth for a CHANGE. Spread the word. OTP sounds good to me. get rid of this ant-American idjut moslem home boy traitor.

Although not my favorite type of music… this ROCKS or hip hops or whatever. I am going to have it cranking when the kids visit… cannot wait to see the expression on their face when they think I have totally flipped out

Can’t wait for both Obama and rap people to disappear completely in the pages of history.

RAP,… RAp,… Rap,….dumb,… dumb,… dumb,…. but must admit,…..

this is the most rap i have ever listened to

And whatever.

 

Last week Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma issued a bizarre “Minority Report” of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in which he called for a criminal investigation of American climate scientists:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)….

Just prior to a hearing at 10:00 a.m. EST, Senator Inhofe released a minority staff report from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, of which he is ranking member. Senator Inhofe is asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists involved, including Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

On the science, Inhofe is, of course, wrong. There is no sane reason to doubt that the 2007 IPCC report is essentially sound: none of the recent “revelations” change that, because they are all nonsense. “Climategate” was always an absurdly hyped pseudo-scandal where the only discernible “crime” was the computer hack on which it was based. The famous “Hockey Stick” model of long-term temperature change has not been “debunked,” but has in fact been vindicated, and anyway is not the Central Pillar of the case for human-caused climate change.

So it is tempting to just laugh at Inhofe — the man is a clown. But as all small children know, clowns are always much less funny than they are incredibly frightening.

Let’s put this in perspective: a sitting United States Senator has called for a criminal probe of scientists because he does not like their conclusions. And also because he has decided to accept wholesale the allegations, insinuations, and downright misrepresentations of certain journalists who have amply demonstrated their utter unaccountablity and lack of anything remotely resembling a scruple.

This is all, in a word, appalling. And while Inhofe is surely grandstanding, playing to the Crazy Choir, let’s face it: if the GOP regains the Senate, Inhofe will once more be chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. With subpoena power.

It sounds crazy — and it is. But, frankly, it really could happen here, scientists compelled by law to appear before a Senate committee to answer the question “are you now, or have you ever been, someone whose research said humans are making the planet warmer?”

This is, quite frankly, precisely what James Inhofe says he wants us to do, and I think it would be a dangerous mistake not to take him at his word. Because, then, who would there be to stop him? His party? Centrist Democrats? Sensible Opinion Writers for Respected Publications?

Sorry, kids, but we’re all going to have to get up off our asses about this. We need a climate bill with teeth, now. And we need to defend our scientists. Vigorously. Now.

[Note: disagreement is OK, but please no disagreement that fails to address a point made in the post, contains no links, or is a conspiracy theory of the “climate science is a hoax so scientists can get rich” class. Thanks. –Thers]

 

Because the first Carrie Prejean wasn’t awful enough!

Hark! to the Breaking News that has been announced on the Fox News Dot Com Light Entertainment Fun Web Site that calls itself “Pop Tarts,” for reasons I don’t especially care to contemplate. Anyway, just… like… read this shit. I mean, holy shit.

Former Miss California Carrie Prejean isn’t the only beauty queen open to expressing her objection to same-sex marriage. Miss Beverly Hills 2010 Lauren Ashley is also speaking out in support of traditional nuptials.

“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white,” Ashley told Pop Tarts.

“I feel like God himself created mankind and he loves everyone, and he has the best for everyone. If he says that having sex with someone of your same gender is going to bring death upon you, that’s a pretty stern warning, and he knows more than we do about life.”

To be fair to the horrible pea-brained bigot, this is at least honest, in the sense that if you are going to make a Bible-based case against homosexuality, you really ought to be up front about how that case involves murdering gay people. “Lauren Ashley” (I refuse by the way to believe that there exists somebody named “Lauren Ashley” on general principles, as that sounds like the name of an off-brand perfume you’d get sneered at for trying to buy at the dollar store. And I should know, since I shop at dollar stores. You get good deals there on arugula lattes. Anyhow.)

I mean, I like that she’s too, er, unfamiliar, with this “speaking in public and not sounding nuts” thing to avoid the underlying contradictions of the “Christian” argument against homosexuality, which, as she explicitly explains, is:

1. God says homosexuals should be put to death.

2. But, remember, and this is a Key Point, when you put homosexuals to death, do it because, like God, you love them very much.

It’s the sort of conundrum Maggie Gallagher sort of skates over.

Though “Lauren Ashley” does sort of recall that she needs to remind us that she has Many Gay Friends:

But with the Miss California Pageant still months away, and Ashley already echoing the views that got Prejean in trouble last year, is she concerned that she may ruin her chances of taking home the tiara?

“That isn’t really the issue. I have a lot of friends that are gay, and … I have a lot of friends who have different views, and we share our views together,” she said. “There’s no hate between me and anyone.”

“You are an abomination unto the LORD and should die in agony for your disgusting unnatural behavior. Oooh, that’s such a nice sweater you’re wearing, what a lovely color!”

Still, as “Pop Tarts” reveals:

And according to the Miss California’s state director, Keith Lewis, a contestant’s personal opinion should have no bearing on the result.

“The Miss California USA system has always had a place for an individual’s thoughts and opinions when it comes to all sides of political issues,” Lewis told Pop Tarts. “It is an organization which empowers women, and everyone is entitled to their own beliefs.”

One wonders if the same would apply to a contestant who winsomely explained that she really does think the ancient Romans really had a point, and Christians should be made to fight lions at the 50 yard line of the Rose Bowl, immediately after being liberally smeared with bar-b-cue sauce.

 

When Harry Truman announced the appearance of the first volume of the Presidential Commission on Higher Education report in 1947, he famously declared:

Higher education in our Nation is confronted today with tremendous responsibilities. Colleges and universities are burdened by great overcrowding and a shortage of teachers. Most importantly, however, we are challenged by the need to insure that higher education shall take its proper place in our national effort to strengthen democracy at home and to improve our understanding of our friends and neighbors everywhere in the world….

A carefully developed program to strengthen higher education, taken together with a program for the support of elementary and secondary education, will inevitably strengthen our Nation and enrich the lives of our citizens.

The Commission’s landmark report, entitled Higher Education for American Democracy, articulated a number of ambitious goals, including eliminating racial and religious discrimination in college admissions and the large-scale creation of community colleges throughout the country. The overall aim of the Commission was to radically expand access to higher education to all Americans.

Of course, college is expensive, then and now. In order to help prospective students pay for these new opportunities to better themselves intellectually and financially, Truman and his Commission came up with an innovative proposal that proved remarkably popular and is widely regarded today as totally and utterly sensible and not at all bizarre, wasteful, or cumbersome:

So that our Nation might become more smarter with the book-learnin’, we hereby decree that if’n you can’t afford tuition, you can take out huge loans from middleman companies that we’re going to shovel truckloads of taxpayer money to, so they can get rich while you spend your entire career paying them back directly and indirectly, by which we mean, paying taxes that will again, uh, go to these private middlemen corporations.  This is of course far more sensible than either lending you the money directly ourselves or, hell, just giving it to you, even though ultimately, perhaps in the next millennium, if we’re lucky, this system will end up pissing away around $87 billion for no sane reason other than making rich corporations and their well-heeled lobbyists richer.

Ha ha ha that is a joke. They didn’t say anything of the sort! Instead, on the affordability issue, what Truman actually proposed  was:

the extension of free public education through the first 2 years of college for all youth who can profit from such education

And

the expansion of Federal support for higher education through scholarships, fellowships, and general aid.

But what we ended up with is this absurd situation where we indirectly support students by directly subsidizing large for-profit corporations. (Yes, my children, there used to be a time when the American government was capable of accomplishing more than conducting stupid wars and funneling public cash to private greedheads. Really!)

Whether or not the Senate is going to do the right thing and reform student aid is up in the air. There are hopeful signs, but then again this is of course the United States Senate we are talking about, which is, unfortunately, full of United States Senators, including such specimens as Evan Bayh.

So who knows what will happen? Always remember that the US Senate is far, far worse than Hell. Hell, of course, is not currently inhabited by Joseph Lieberman.

 

The facts about human-caused global climate change have not changed: it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s a bitch. Also, because we are collectively burdened with an utterly dysfunctional political system which allows undue influence to liars, fools, cowards, weenies, loudmouths, hacks, charlatans, and absolute dickweeds, the chances of the American government taking positive action to deal with this crisis are remote.

So if you have kids and grandkids, apologize to them now for the trashed planet they’re bound to inherit. I myself am stockpiling whiskey supplies for my toddlers. When they’re my age, they’ll put them to excellent use. I just have to make sure they know enough not to contaminate the stuff with water, which will be larded up with amoebas and bacteria and so forth which is unlikely to be particularly flavorful and will by then likely have sufficiently evolved to become microscopic alcoholic life-forms. Why should us mammals have all the fun.

Anyhow it’s worth noting the incredibly shoddy — and loathsome — quality of the attacks on the science, and the scientists doing it. These attacks have lately originated in the British gutter press, from whence they get picked up in the American gutter right blogosphere, are squawked over by the American gutter Republican party, and are thence laundered into semi-respectability by the American gutter Washington Post.

At any rate, if you want to know what is actually going on with the science and the lying about the science, RealClimate explains it all.

It’s important. Go read it.

 

The biggest problem with 21st Century Conservatism isn’t so much that so many 21st Century are running around like absolute morons. No, the problem is that they are proud to be running around like absolute morons. Examples, of course, abound. But few spectacles illustrate the point more luridly than the Utah House of Representatives deciding to, essentially, stick an ostrich feather up its collective ass and wiggle it around in what it fondly imagines to be an insulting manner at Science.

Carbon dioxide is “essentially harmless” to human beings and good for plants. So now will you stop worrying about global warming?

Utah’s House of Representatives apparently has at least. Officially the most Republican state in America, its political masters have adopted a resolution condemning “climate alarmists”, and disputing any scientific basis for global warming.

The measure, which passed by 56-17, has no legal force, though it was predictably claimed by climate change sceptics as a great victory….

Meaning, imbeciles like Don Surber (pictured here) are gurgling about how the Utah Representatives are trying to  “protect their economy” from the perfidy of the United Nations (!): “Not that the UN has no stake in the matter; it hopes to turn global warming fears into a global tax to fund the UN.” Surber also believes evil UN-funded leprechauns are conspiring to tighten the backflap of his trap-door long johns so as to give him a Socialist Wedgie.

But it certainly is true that Utah’s fine Representatives are deeply interested in their local economy. For instance:

With respect to Utah, coal holds a firm grip on the state since close to 90 percent of their electricity comes from coal. Understandably, many in Utah are strongly opposed to cap-and-trade. Utah coal mines produced 26 million tons of coal in 2006, making Utah the 12th biggest coal-producing state in the country. Its coal fired plants emit approximately 41 million tons of CO2, 34,000 tons of sulfur dioxide and 68,000 tons of nitrogen dioxide. This results in Utah coal plants producing 66 percent of the state’s total carbon emissions.

Not that this means that everyone with a stake in the Utah economy is delighted with the recent yahoo-ism. Some indeed have excellent reason to be alarmed, as unchecked climate change will, er, convert Utah from an inhabitable desert to an uninhabitable desert. Maybe the Utah House of Representatives is working on a way to make coal edible, however, so the loss of the snowpack and of arable land won’t come as too much of a blow. That’s probably the case.

After all, you couldn’t hardly accuse the Utah House of Representatives of grotesque irresponsibility, just because “There are very few (if any) scientifically legitimate statements located in the text of the resolution,” which there aren’t. After all, the House was so kind as to take out the kookier language from the resolution, such as that climate change is a “conspiracy” concocted by scientists who wish to remain on the governmental “gravy train.” No, the Utah reps have behaved admirably, except when they’ve behaved like comical pigs. For instance:

Rep. Noel: “Are you stating on record that CO2 is a pollutant? Are you saying that CO2, carbon dioxide, is a pollutant, are you saying that?”

Professor Andrade: “I’m saying that carbon dioxide has a unique molecular structure which absorbs infrared radiation, and that that is in part responsible for the effects that you’re concerned with, Representative Gibson is concerned with, and Representative ….”

Noel: “I want to get this on the record, ok? Are you saying that we have to rid the planet of carbon dioxide?”

Andrade: “Of course not!”

Noel: “It’s not a pollutant then, it’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to kill plants. Is that correct? I also have a degree too, professor. So I want to get this straight. Is it a pollutant?”

(The conversation becomes a verbal skirmish, and the committee chairman breaks it up.)

A rebuttal of the absurd “scientific claims” in the resolution may be found here. But really, this is about as embarrassing a performance by a state government in a while — and it’s a pretty accurate foreshadowing of what will happen if the GOP regains control of the federal legislature. Which is why I’m so irritated at the Democrats for helping them do this by acting like such goddamn cowards. My kids, you know, just can’t afford whining in the face of lunacy.

 

One of the more fascinating characteristics of our conservative friends is what whiny little urine-rashed crybabies they are. Take this bit of sniveling from noted right-wing fatheaded fuck Dennis Prager, for instance.

If one had to read one columnist to appreciate the state of contemporary left-wing commentary, my nomination would be Frank Rich of the Sunday New York Times.

No well-known leftist columnist better exemplifies the worst aspects of today’s left. Virtually every piece is filled with anger, filled with ad hominem responses to arguments, filled with insults of opponents and at the same time devoid of intellectual arguments. A Frank Rich column is essentially a weekly tantrum meant to make his readers nod in agreement and reinforce their contempt for those who differ with them.

Frank Rich? Prager can’t take Frank Rich-level invective? Jeez, one can but hope Prager doesn’t discover the Internet anytime soon, the chickenshit little prissy-ass fuckfaced twerp, ’cause the vile stuff he finds there might just shrivel up his nubby little dick so much he won’t be able to rape his wife properly in the way Jesus intended. (And if you think I’m being just a tad harsh on the hideous poisonous pissant asslicker insect, click those last two links and get back to me.)

Anyway, the problem Prager has with Rich is that Rich said that the people who squawk the loudest about getting rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are (my paraphrase) great horrible homophobic shit-for-brains bigots. As my esteemed colleague Dr. B. Texan has pointed out, this is in fact a pretty accurate description of Prager himself, as well as the swine he lies down with. But waah, waah, Prager stamps his itty-bitty feet and bawls that it’s just not twoo, he is a Big-Boy who Makes Big-Boy Intellectual Arguments in favor of brainless hateful discrimination against people his God tells him are going to Hell because of how abominable they are:

Where is this mainstream conservative “explicit anti-gay animus?”

That would be in the active campaigning to deny gays equal rights, dumbass. We don’t fucking find that sort of behavior particularly endearing. “I don’t think you deserve to marry the person you love! C’mere and give Uncle Denny a hug and we’ll discuss this as intellectual equals!” You know, fuck off.

And why are the arguments that gays in a military unit may fall in love with one another (or with a straight person) or that for the same reason — sexual tension — that we do not have men and women in the same units, showering and sleeping together, we might not deem it a good idea to have sexual tension in an all-men’s unit — why are these arguments “loopy” and “groundless”?

Because, moron, they’re “really fucking stupid.” Look, you not-remotely-smart person whose mental processes most closely resemble that of a meth-addled goat whose brain has rotted away from the effects of acute untreated tertiary syphilis caused by promiscuous chimp-fucking, the current policy allows gays to serve now, and thus all this (largely imaginary) “sexual tension” is already going on. It’s just that nobody can talk about it without getting kicked out in disgrace. Only someone who thinks “hide in shame, pervert” is the correct attitude for all homosexuals to adopt would defend DADT. (Oh by the way look who’s not defending it. America! And, soldiers! Amazing!)

“Conservatives” sure do like to complain about how liberals think they’re idiots. But then what the fuck other assessments are we supposed to make about people who preen themselves on how Very Intellectual they are and adduce as evidence their scientific illiteracy, economic ignorance, and foreign policy lunacy? If you don’t like being called a hateful idiot, well, stop going out in public and openly admitting you’re Dennis fucking spousal-sex-deviant Prager.

I mean, think of the children.

 

The Super Bowl isn’t until tomorrow, but some of our friends from Greater Wingnuttia are already acting like they took a shot to the head from a 350 pound offensive lineman. It makes sense: internet “conservatives” like saying stupid things about “liberals”; the Super Bowl is a major event; the temptation to say stupid things about “liberals” and the Super Bowl must have just overwhelmed their tiny little pea-sized brains.

At the astonishingly ill-named American Thinker, for openers, “Troy Nelson” catches Barack Obama in the grip of Cold Inexorable Logic, accusing him of saying he is sort of pulling for The Saints this year because of how the city had a bad time of it with  Hurricane Katrina. But in in 2006 Obama wanted his hometown Chicago Bears to beat the Saints in the NFC Championship game! This is, we are told, “shiftiness.” But even worse, it is evidence that Obama is not an Ayn Rand fan. Honestly, that’s what “Troy Nelson” says.

Shiftiness notwithstanding, I think President Obama’s answer is simpatico with this generation’s elevation of “victimology” and symbology above all else. Rather than focusing on the teams playing the game the rooting has been transferred to the more “deserving” team by proxy of their suffering fans. The Saints represent their fans which represent New Orleans which represents Katrina which represents victims of a storm event… which happened five years ago. See, the choice should be easy.

What happened to the days of pulling for organizations, teams, and players whom best demonstrate the virtues of team work and heart and will power? Who overcome the challenges of a determined opponent on the level playing field of competition? Of blood, sweat, and tears? I guess in our coddled, emasculated, socialist society any overt demonstration or celebration of these qualities is offensive, too Darwinian, too Randian, too capitalistic.

This is very convincing, in the sense that is offers even yet still more evidence that people who take Ayn Rand seriously are crazy halfwit assholes whose only discernible skill lies in developing startling new ways to prove that they are, in fact, crazy halfwit assholes. (See also here and here.)

A similarly goobery line of “argument” is likewise pursued by “Rich Tucker” over at Townhall. “Rich Tucker” believes that the NFL’s use of instant replay is Wicked, and that liberals are in favor of the instant replay rule for exactly the same reasons liberals want healthcare reform. Honestly, that’s what “Rich Tucker” says.

Conservatives understand that people will make mistakes. Receivers will drop perfectly thrown passes. Running backs will fumble in the open field. Officials will miss a call now and again. Liberals may believe it’s possible to call a game perfectly if we get just the right amount of oversight. For similar reasons, they also believe the government ought to provide everybody’s health care.

Stupid liberals, believing officials should do their jobs and people shouldn’t go broke because they need healthcare. He sure did show us the error of our ways! (I actually had no idea the instant replay rule was “liberal,” perhaps because “Rich Tucker” just made that up in his tiny little pea-sized head.)

 

Who is more oppressed than James O’Keefe, the conservative Investigative Reporter who last year revealed to an astonished America the widespread scandal of how make-believe pimps can get free legal advice, easily the greatest threat our great nation has faced since Hitler? And what is his reward for his heroism? He was very extremely literally media-lynched – and there can be no more horrible kind of lynching — because he took the very logical step of committing felony fraud to prove that a US Senator doesn’t answer her phones promptly enough.

And now O’Keefe is being media-lynched again! Shocking!

His right-wing admirers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30  on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O’Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

It’s hard out there for a make-believe pimp, I suppose. The real question though, is how long, oh Lord, how long, will smarmy little wingnuts be accused of bigotry solely for acting like bigots? As Moses said to Pharaoh, let my douchebags go.