Wednesday, December 10, 2014

WRONG FROM THE START.

One of the guys stepping up to defend America's recently revealed torture is Max Boot.  Like his fellow pain freak Andrew C. McCarthy, he puts quotes around "torture," because apparently the reported horrors of our Black Sites are not a big deal to him. He implicates Dianne Feinstein and John F. Kennedy, which is okay by me, or would be if he were trying to drag them down with him -- but Boot thinks the real crime is complaining about the torture, not furthering it.  He actually says, "It’s easy to denounce such brutal measures from the safety of an armchair" as if that were worse than approving them from the same armchair. He concludes:
Whatever the case, of one thing I am positive: that the release of the Senate report will only aid our enemies who will have more fodder for their propaganda mills. It is hard to see how it will serve the interests of the United States, because even if you believe the interrogations in question were war crimes, the reality remains that they were long discontinued. Feinstein’s report merely rakes up history and for no good purpose beyond predictable congressional grandstanding.
If your conscience does not respond to this, let me remind you what Boot is.

In 2003 Boot cheered the coming Iraq clusterfuck. "Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets," he said. He had no doubt of the mission's success: "With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region's many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us."

That same year he bade America take the fight to North Korea and Iran, quoting Kipling: "Taking on all of them is a big commitment, but as Kipling warned America, 'Ye dare not stoop to less.'" We'll beat those fuzzy-wuzzies in no time!

In 2005, apparently still excited by the bloodbaths, Boot reached back into history to approve the infamous Moro Massacre in the Philippines and its architect, Leonard Wood: "His scorched-earth policy sparked controversy but achieved results."

The course of action Boot endorsed has since been proven a disaster, but he has continued to yap and snarl. In 2011 he wept over America's withdrawal from Iraq -- "The issue of immunity could have been finessed," he insisted, "if administration lawyers from the Departments of State and Defense had not insisted that Iraq’s parliament would have to vote to grant our troops protections from Iraqi laws." It should be no surprise that Boot sees the wishes of elected representatives as a useless nuisance. Boot didn't want us to get out of Afghanistan either -- why, what would Kipling think?

Boot still bays for blood in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere. In 2013 he condemned Edward Snowden, whom he said "needs to see a psychiatrist or a minister rather than to be granted access to the front pages of the world to blow some of the U.S. government’s most important intelligence-gathering activities."

In short, Boot is the last person we should be listening to -- but then, he always was. It's worth asking why this moral leper still has a place in our discourse.

AND STILL NO BENEFITS OR PAID SICK DAYS.

While some of those few citizens who did not know that America tortures people basically for the hell of it got an earful from the Senate report -- you can read the Republican response, which basically complains that Democrats are unfairly making torture look bad -- House Republicans held a witch trial at which Congressmen stepped up to hurl carefully crafted and vetted insults at Jonathan Gruber, a freelance employee who had the poor taste to articulate said Congressmen's main political operating principle. Contract employees, beware and follow the dress code, these fuckers are strict!

Conservatives did their best to hoopla this travesty, many claiming that the Democrats released the torture report just to upstage it and thus vitiate its potentially devastating effects (don't laugh, some of them think Gruber's comments will actually convince the Supreme Court to kill Obamacare). But my favorite angle so far is that of National Review Jim Geraghty:
Americans, you got really upset about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment. It’s understandable; you figured that the candidate was saying something nice about the voters as a whole when in public, and writing off a lot of voters as hopeless and hapless when behind closed doors. 
That is exactly what Jonathan Gruber did. Over and over again.
Difference left unmentioned: Romney was the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and Gruber was a fucking temp. Next week, a janitor at the Capitol will sneeze on the statue of Father Junipero Serra and, when this obvious anti-clericalist's voting record reveals him to be a Democrat, all hell will once again break loose.

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

THE "LIBERTARIAN MOMENT" RETURNS, IN A CAMEO ROLE.

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post on Chris Hughes, the internet doofus who has lately been mulching The New Republic:
...Hughes lashed out in a group email to staff because [New Republic] senior editor (and former Post reporter) Alec MacGillis had dared to propose writing a piece about Apple avoiding taxes just after Apple’s Tim Cook had come out of the closet. Hughes shot back that “Apple has acted squarely within the law” and that MacGillis’s argument would be “tone deaf.” MacGillis quickly backed off, but Hughes did not, writing twice more to defend Apple’s tax strategy and to call Cook “incredibly heroic” for coming out.
As you might expect, the g-factor causes a frother at rightwing Jesus site First Things to explode in straight rage:
Capital is cloaking itself in the rainbow flag... One must choose one’s loyalties. In this case and in many others, the Democratic Party and its organs have chosen the sexual desires of the rich over the economic aspirations of working Americans... Gay rights have allowed oligarchy to put on progressive drag...(et hetero)
Come let us Reason together, says National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru to the frother: Ponnuru's not asking him to like Those People, but he does ask him to focus on the greater good:
Even if the generalization is true — and it may well be — this comment seems a bit off. It’s not at all obvious to me that Apple would be doing any great favors for “working Americans” by paying more taxes than legally required. I can well see how social conservatives might be nostalgic for an older form of liberalism that placed less emphasis on sexual liberation than today’s. Nostalgia should not, however, lead conservatives to parrot that liberalism’s view of the economy.
In other words: Fag-bashing may be fun, but give Hughes a break -- he was after all defending a corporate oligarch, and isn't that really what the new libertarianism-injected conservatism is really all about?

Like I've been saying all along, libertarianism is just a niche brand of conservatism, and you see it more clearly when the parent brand asserts it.

UPDATE. In comments, hellslittlestangel encapsulates nicely: "While it's true that Jesus said, 'Hate your neighbor,' let's not forget that he also helped the money-changers get a tax-exemption for working out of a temple." But Rugosa is puzzled: "'Sexual desires of the rich'? Does that mean that having lots of money causes the gay? So maybe we should tax the wealthy into heterosexuality."

Monday, December 08, 2014

AND IN CONCLUSION, DERP DERP DERP DERP DERP.

At PJ Media, Spencer Klavan (before we go on, thank me: This link is to the single-page version -- the default is "page 1 of 10") :
Why Conservatives Should Make More Dumb Jokes
South Park Republicanism will never die. To sum up: As Aristophanes knew, fart jokes make people like/vote for you. But liberals stole the fart jokes! Judd Apatow was cool because he made Katherine Heigl have a baby, but IRL he "moans about Citizens United" so his fart jokes are invalid. Conservative need to take back the fart jokes!

Finally, the punch line:
We need a little more of that fun-loving, free-wheeling irreverence that the Left is pretending to monopolize. We need more folks like Greg Gutfeld and Ann Coulter...
Stop, yer killing me.

I KNOW WHO LET'S BLAME!

Shorter Jim Geraghty, National Review: It's 2014 and race is still a problem in America. This is clearly the fault of the black guy in the White House.

UPDATE. Speaking of which, here's Victor Davis Miles Gloriosus Hanson on America's recent wave of police-and-race demonstrations, which he seems to think have more to do with Michael Brown than with Eric Garner -- well, it's all the same to Hanson; that Trayvon Martin was a thug, too, and anyway what the protesters really want is a lawless Negrocracy in which cops cower before the dusky hordes:
Some of the public may think that the lessons of Michael Brown — and Trayvon Martin — are that it is unwise to commit a crime and then assault an officer, or confront a stranger in the rain and slug him in the head and get into a tussle, given that such targets may be armed and may respond with deadly force. But I think critics would privately respond that in Al Sharpton’s America both cases instead advise to take the beating and do not dare use a firearm for self-protection from assault on the chance the attacker is unarmed. In retrospect, Zimmerman might have preferred to have been “whoop-assed,” or Wilson preferred being slugged than to become lifelong targeted pariahs...

Will some law enforcement officials now surmise that it is wiser to ignore some crimes in the inner city on the practicable logic that the denouement for the officer will likely be negative — either by stopping the assailant through force or not stopping the assault and thus being assaulted?
You white liberals will be sorry when the oogaboogas steal your latte money! Beyond this Afro-6 vision, there's the usual black-on-black-blahblah ("That 5,000 to 6,000 African-Americans are murdered each year, the vast majority by other blacks... is not so important as the single death of Michael Brown"), and how come there's no riots when black people (who are not cops) kill white people, etc. Also, Hanson invokes Al Sharpton three times; maybe he thinks it's like Beetlejuice and it'll free him from this mixed-race netherworld before they remake Clash of the Titans with Morgan Freeman and spoil all hope of escape.

Friday, December 05, 2014

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


(How'd I miss The Dirtbombs all these years? Thanks Sherri!)

•   MRA promoter The Ole Perfesser has steered his readers to this Andrew Klavan video explaining #GamerGate to older conservatives. Klavan gives viewers a little background: "For decades left-wingers have dominated the arts, using movies, television, novels, and critical articles (!!- Ed.) to sell idiot notions like 'America is oppressive,'  'capitalism is evil,' 'gender difference is bigotry,' and 'God is dead'..." The upshot is that wingnuts own gaming and from this cultural redoubt can counter the lies of "left-wing game journalists" with the help of "honest journalists such as Milo Yiannopoulos, of Breitbart.com" (Yeah I know but that's an actual quote) to promote conservative ideas such as Eat Me, Bitch. No mention at all of the appalling harassment visited upon uncooperative females by these knight-like dorks, but lots of tit jokes.  Klavan's approach hasn't changed much since this 2009 Democrats are Like Rapists video, but at least his references move with the times: He refers throughout to "Hashtag-Gamergate," and if the geezers in his audience can figure out what it means they should be stalking Anita Sarkeesian in no time.

•   Speaking of hashtags, thanks, Simon Maloy, for reminding me of this:


Now that gas prices are plummeting, looking at those old #250Gas tweets is fun -- and so is reading Megan McArdle's unusually brief, tight-lipped post on the drop; as you might expect from an acolyte of the oil-dependent Koch Brothers she sounds nervous about it: "Texas, North Dakota and other places in the U.S. will suffer as oil prices decline and some of the high-paid jobs in oil production go away," she writes. Well, that's capitalism, comrade; I wonder if those absurd boomtown prices North Dakota oil workers are paying for their apartments will go down in response. I'm guessing not, 'cause that's capitalism, too, these days. You can also read Joseph Curl at the Washington Times: "Cheap gas prices? Obama’ll fix that" -- 'cause he'll eventually kill the good times with regulations to fix the so-called "environment," just you wait. Sigh, some people are never satisfied.

•   You can always count on Jonah Goldberg:
Reasonable people can disagree on whether racism was involved in the tragic death of Eric Garner. My own suspicion is that this misfortune could have transpired just as easily with a white man resisting arrest and/or a black cop choking him... 
But you know what reasonable people can’t dispute? New York’s cigarette taxes are partly to blame for Eric Garner’s death.
Racism? In America? Meh, Jonah doesn't see it; when he goes "WHAT IT IS" to the black guy at the deli, he doesn't get any static, man. But that cigarette taxes killed Garner -- that's indisputable!
Everyone agrees: No one should die for selling bootleg cigarettes. But if you pass and enforce a law against such things, you increase the chances things might go wrong. That’s a fact, whether it sounds callous to delicate ears or not
Just like how stop signs cause rear-end collisions! Goldberg also compares taxing cigarettes to the drug war, though for some reason he doesn't cite thousands of other cigarette-tax-enforcement deaths, or any, that would support this analogy. Here's my favorite part of this mess:
When you pass a law, you authorize law enforcement to enforce it. That’s actually why they’re called 'law enforcement.' Google it.
This mind-blanking stupidity is wonderful enough, but the supercilious tone is just so Goldberg.

•   Goldberg's traditional reign as the permanent author of the stupidest thing ever written is being challenged by the Cato Institute's David Boaz:
The violent death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia set off the Arab Spring. Could the killing of Eric Garner lead to a springtime of police reform – and regulatory reform -- in the United States? 
Bouazizi was a street vendor, selling fruits and vegetables from a cart...
Yes, Garner's problem was that he just wanted to run his little cig biz, just like Bouazizi, but the statists wouldn't let him, so he set himself on fire was choked to death by a white cop. Unlike Goldberg (who probably couldn't help himself) Boaz studiously ignores the subject of race:
Eric Garner's death has also set off protests, not just in New York but in Boston, Chicago, Washington, and other places. Many protesters held signs reading "I can't breathe" and "This stops now." They should add "I'm minding my business. Just leave me alone."
Maybe Boaz should make this plea directly to the protesters: "You people are diluting the free-market message of Garner! Here's a script, I'll be at this steakhouse over here." I imagine years hence, after the neo-feudal conversion of America is complete, conservatives will toast Eric Garner's role in normalizing the no-benefits workplace.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

AND THEN LET'S REPEAL THAT STATIST CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS.

Mad about the Eric Garner verdict? Think it's another case of cops killing a black man with impunity? Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds wants to set you straight. The Perfesser says it has nothing to do with race -- in fact, he wonders what all these black people are upset about:
Listening to NPR on the way back from the UT Studio — I taped a segment on this for The Independents on Fox Business tonight — they kept stressing that it was a WHITE officer who had killed a BLACK MAN. You could pretty much hear the capitals in their voices. They’d never stress race that way in other circumstances. And it’s not clear that excessive force by police is especially a racial problem. In Alabama, we had the shooting of a unarmed white 18-year old by a black cop; in Utah, we had the Dillan Taylor shooting, also unarmed, also not prosecuted. Racializing the issue makes it more divisive and less likely to be addressed.
I'll see the Perfesser's two cases and raise him four unarmed black guys and that was in one month -- and there's plenty more where that came from.

Of course, if you've been living in the United States of America for a while and paying attention, you probably don't need the explanation.

The Perfesser also has a solution:
If police can’t be accountable for their use of force, then we shouldn’t have police. Fire ‘em all and privatize.
Because privatization worked so well with prisons. Jesus, these people are so reliably wrong that when they finally object to a cop killing a black guy, it's for crackpot reasons.

UPDATE. Reynolds is just one of the conservatives who are outraged by Garner not because of this "black lives matter" thing you hippies think is important, but because free enterprise:
Whereas many conservatives said Wilson was simply doing his job, some on Wednesday said Pantaleo was enforcing a punitive big government policy. And while Brown was nothing more than a "thug," Garner was the victim of the dreaded nanny state. 
"A man is killed for selling *unlicensed* drugs by a cop who walks even though it's all on video: Putting the 'police' in pink police state," tweeted New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Wednesday. 
Douthat was one of several conservative media personalities to seize on New York's law against selling single, untaxed cigarettes.
Whereas if they'd killed him for walking in the middle of the street, well, no big whoop.

UPDATE 2. CNN:
Rand Paul blames Eric Garner's death on high NYC cigarette tax
The still-alive white guy selling you smokes out of the trunk of his car is laughing his ass off.

UPDATE 3. In comments, Kevin Berger reminds us that Ferguson is already sort of a libertarian privatizer's paradise, as it makes its poorest citizens fund the city with user fees masquerading as criminal justice. New York, on the other hand, is in the usage of Robert Tracinski a "nanny state" that taxes regular people, which is why he and every other asshole is rushing to declare that the first dead black guy they ever troubled over is really all about taxes and race has nothing to do with it, except insofar as liberals are (I swear to God he said this) "hoping for a new series of contentious, racially charged killings."

It's the new wingnut fad, alright, and here's proof: Look at the change in that ancient authoritarian John Podhoretz. When de Blasio was elected, Podhoretz was telling us that the ooga-booga barricades had broken down and it would be Crown Heights Riots every day from now on -- why, just last week he was telling New York Post readers that we were "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like," and blubbering over the end of stop-and-frisk. Now he's telling us that we don't need Broken Windows policing anymore! Man, they're good at message discipline -- what a pity that their message sucks.

UPDATE 4. OFFS:


Yeah -- Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, and Eric Garner; I can see the connection. Hey, I wonder what tax Rumain Brisbon was resisting?

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

MINE, BY THE RIGHT OF THE WHITE ELECTION.

Conservatives are making big promises about the downfall of their enemies (i.e., all rational people) and their own coming Reich; see, for example Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson's "Liberalism in Ruins" -- boy, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one! Byron York is no exception. Now that the HNIC is leaving the White House, he says, blacks will stop voting Democratic, as will those other pesky interest groups to whom his Nubian charm appealed:
First the coalition: Obama's powerful appeal to minorities, women, and young people propelled his decisive wins in 2008 and 2012. But those voters didn't show up at the polls in 2010 and 2014. 
Some Democrats are confident the coalition will be back in 2016, when interest in a presidential race is far greater than during midterms. But will it return in the strength it showed in '08 and '12? Or will Democratic voting return to pre-Obama patterns?
So, this is a great time for the GOP to appeal to and pick up these stray black, Latino and female voters and shore up their legitimacy as a national party, right?

Don't be silly. York has no advice on that, because even Washington Examiner readers wouldn't understand why he was bothering. But white people -- that's another story:
"Given its sheer size, the working-class white population in the U.S. is of keen importance to politicians and strategists on both sides of the aisle," Gallup wrote recently, noting "the complex set of attitudes and life positions which … have pushed this group further from the Democratic president over the past six years." 
If Democrats don't find a way to connect with those "attitudes and life positions" of working-class whites in coming years, they'll have a big problem...

In the end, no single group will mean defeat for the Democrat and victory for the Republican in 2016. But President Obama's troubling legacy — a weakened coalition and growing ranks of alienated white voters — could mean a serious post-presidential hangover for Democrats.
"No single group" is a nice evasive harrumph-harrumph, but the message of York's column is clearly that women, youth, and minority votes can only be lost -- like some kind of gas that escapes, evaporates, and is seen no more -- whereas white votes are something you can win by appealing to their "complex set of attitudes and life positions." Normally, based on his previous writings and conservative history, I would assume York considers these to be the usual hatred of minorities, contempt for the poor etc., but his column suggests he's at least dimly aware that the most effective thing conservatives can communicate to white people is that they are to be taken more seriously than anyone else.

Monday, December 01, 2014

HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 391,267,346,583.

Don Surber -- an asshole whose greatest claim to fame is being fired for calling the late Michael Brown an animal -- is pushing what seems to be the current conservative line: That black people were manipulated against their wills into protesting the Wilson decision in Ferguson, and that the ensuing riots were committed by Katie Couric and Dan Rather. Excerpt:
The looters won, thanks to President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Governor Jay Nixon -- Democrats all -- who ignored the truth and the facts of the case to fan the flames of violence, across the country. People have begun calling these the Obama Riots. Expect more.
"Calling these the Obama Riots"? Who's calling them that? Pro that he is, Surber provides a link -- to Breitbart.com, which is telling readers to call them that ("CALL FERGUSON DEMONSTRATIONS WHAT THEY ARE: 'OBAMA RIOTS'"). Give Breitbart credit, though -- they didn't descend to actually pretending this was a common usage, perhaps because they knew some lower species of propagandist would do it for them.

UPDATE. In comments, Giant Monster Gamera: "Obama Phones, Obama Care, Obama Riots, Obama Nation... Haven't these people heard that any publicity is good publicity?"

UPDATE 2. New troll policy, guys, starting now: our troll's remarks will be deleted, as will all replies to them. Let him take his sick need for negative attention somewhere else, and let someone else give it to him.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

SUNDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

•    I hadn't looked in on National Review's "Postmodern Conservative" blog and its author Carl Eric Scott for some time (and with good reason!), so I opened up Scott's recent post on the University of Virginia's sexual assault issues and holy moley: First he advises that the school make the kids rape-proof by having them read books like Elizabeth Kantor’s The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After, and then --
And as long as we’re open to having our colleges mandate or “nudge” education on such matters, what we should really push is social dancing. I’m flat-out serious about this recommendation. Dance instructors are inexpensive, don’t have to be tenured or admitted to the bar, and don’t have to teach a sexual-ethics curriculum that we’d have to get the typical faculty of 90-98% non-conservative members to agree to. They really would provide a habituation that shapes sexual and social inclinations in ways more positive than not, and which could culminate in youth-culture patterns that diminish the hold of the worst Greek houses and the general expectations of hook-ups and binge-drinking.
Because no one ever drank too much or had sex, forced or otherwise, after doing the Lindy Hop and the Big Apple.  I don't know why he didn't also prescribe snoods and Wildroot Cream Oil, which in our forefathers' day eased sexual tension with soothing lanolin.

•    Some of the St. Louis Rams came on the field with their hands up today in a Ferguson solidarity gesture, and Michelle Malkin's rage aggregator Twitchy is on it, with these representative reactions from conservative thinkers: "Uggghhh," "idiots," "dumb," etc.  Weep, Buckley, weep. (From the way the game's going, though, you'd think it was the Raiders who came out with their hands up.)

•    Wow, the Rams thing has riled a big nest of enraged dummies. I must be confused: From the way Hot Air's Jazz Shaw talks about it --
Even if we weren’t talking about the Ferguson shooting, I have no interest in seeing a player come out waving a banner declaring their pro-abortion or pro-life position. That family in the stands didn’t lay out $300 or more for tickets, overpriced hot dogs and giant foam fingers to hear you pontificate on the merits of a flat tax.
-- it sounds like the Rams players did a big production number, with signs and speeches and whatnot; I had heard they just came out with their hands up. Guess the MSM is lying to me!

Rick Moran is deeply concerned:
What this very public display of ignorance may do to the team chemsitry of the Rams is another question.
Right after they came out with their hands up, the Rams beat the Raiders 52 to 0. We should all have such chemistry problems.

Moran naturally wants the players punished, but despairs of the League taking action because "the NFL's very public outreach to minority communities will force them to take a neutral stance in the matter." Always coddling black people, those guys! Why, if the white guys on the team came out wearing Klan robes in support of Officer Wilson, you'd never hear the end of it. Moran closes:
It will be interesting to watch the introductions to tonight's NFL game between Miami and the New York Jets. The five Rams players may have started a trend that the NFL may have to address whether they want to or not.
I understand the Jets will do a 20-minute ballet number based on the life and death of Patrick Dorismond, with one of those inflatable rats unions put up at picket lines representing Rudolph Giuliani. Hey, maybe I'll start watching these games again!

Friday, November 28, 2014

AND HOW WAS YOUR THANKSGIVING?

Some of us spent Thanksgiving feasting with friends and counted our blessings. Others...


You'll agree this is one badass RedState political blogger, at least on the holodeck. Wait'll you hear what he'd tell Mike Brown's parents!

Anyway hope you're getting some slack this holiday weekend -- I personally have resolved to take it easy and not subject myself to this:

Bill Whittle questioning The Ole Pefesser about robot sex is the last thing I want to -- oh okay, a few minutes:
If you count a vibrator as a sex robot, then about half the women in America are having sex with robots already. And that doesn't seem to creep people out.
Call me when one of them spends a million dollars to make her Hitachi look like Benedict Cumberbatch. Later Reynolds says the first mass market sexbots in Japan will probably look more like anime characters because some guys dig that -- "they don't have to look quite human." I think Hasbro already filled this gap.


Wednesday, November 26, 2014

PRE-THANKSGIVING AROUND-THE-HORN.

•    Remember a few days back, when Rod Dreher was flipping out that New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses, and blaming this bestiality breakthrough on our tolerance of gay marriage? He's still on about it! He has dragged in the equally awful Damon Linker, who tries to reassure Dreher that "most people will continue to live boring, mundane sex lives, monogamously committed to one human being of the opposite sex at a time." You'd think this vanilla vision of the future would cheer Dreher, but it does not; he rehashes his previous mopes and also complains that "'emerging adult' Catholics are abandoning the faith in droves." Dreher himself abandoned Catholicism years ago, but that was different because 1.) he's Rod Dreher, the center of the universe, and 2.) he quit to join another hardass skygod sect, not to go friggin' and frugin' with the hippies, as he seems to assume the non-Dreher apostates will do. I thought at first Dreher, despite his roots in rural Louisiana, was somehow unaware of the ancient association of Southern hicks with barnyard sex, but now I'm thinking he does know, and has in fact been hired by the local chamber of commerce to get it associated with urban sophisticates instead.

•    Erick Erickson has a full-on soregasm because Ezra Klein doubts Officer Wilson's story about how Demon Mike Brown made him kill him. Why that sissy Klein knows nothing about "the blue collar of existence of a beat cop and what that cop sees," unlike red-blooded, ham-faced lawyer/politician Erick Erickson:
I think liberals like Klein who find Darren Wilson’s statement as simply too incredible to be true need to call their local police force and see if they can tag along in a squad car a few times. I have done it. It is quite an education.
Yeah, like that time the cops Erickson was with those cops who shot a black guy dead, and then were allowed to bag their own guns as evidence, and the prosecutor told the grand jury not to take it all too seriously -- you libtards don't realize this is the real world!

•    If you need some what-a-bunch-of-morons for entertainment, look at the responses to any Progressive Insurance @ItsFlo tweet, such as this one; most of the respondents are wingnuts enraged that the insurer gives all its money to George Soros:


Lewis, who did contribute to liberal causes, stepped down as Progressive chairman in 2000 and died in 2013. But tell that to the salt of the earth, the common clay -- or to John Hawkins of Right Wing News, who was telling his poor readers in 2013 that Lewis was still in charge and "may be the biggest liberal sugar daddy on the block." Actually, considering the difficulty they have understanding health insurance, maybe conservatives should boycott all insurance as socialism. Hell, those pointy-headed actuaries even believe in global warming!

•    A John Podhoretz (ding!) column in the New York Post (ding!) called "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like" (dingdingdingding!) was bound to be a nightmare, and it is -- all about how you liberals don't remember the crime it was so bad you must worship the Man on the Beat etc. But the bit where Podhoretz tells black folks to cool it over Ferguson is awful even for him:
It might surprise Al Sharpton to hear this, but even among white people, it’s rare to find any American who’s only ever had pleasant interchanges with police officers. 
Every year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 41 million speeding tickets are written in the United States. The notion that only minorities have infuriating encounters with cops is belied by that astounding factoid. 
After all, is there a soul alive who hasn’t reacted negatively (in his heart, at least) to the cop who comes to the driver-side window and asks that obnoxious and oddly schoolmarmish question: “Do you know why I stopped you?”
I dunno what black people are bitching about -- white people get speeding tickets all the time!

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

REPUBLICAN OUTREACH TO MINORITIES CONTINUES.

Some online conservatives, who haven't had proper media training,  express their feelings thus:


The better-trained ones mostly settle on the notion that the simple-minded black folk of Ferguson would not be angry but for the Liberal Media, who have riled them to violence so they can Smash the State. Radio shouter Mark Levin:
Ferguson burns and violence has been unleashed thanks to the reckless liberal media, the lawless administration (especially Eric Holder) exploiting the shooting to smear police departments across the nation, phony civil rights demagogues, race-baiting politicians, and radical hate groups.
Missing from this list is "a white cop getting away with killing an unarmed black kid." To Levin, of course Brown got what was coming -- fired upon, he raced away from and then back toward the source of the gunfire, which makes perfect sense. Levin demands that we now  turn our attention to the real victims:
What we are witnessing now is the left's war on the civil society. It's time to speak out in defense of law enforcement and others trying to protect the community and uphold the rule law.
Well, so much for that GOP Libertarian Moment, huh? I expect a lot of conservatives who made meek objections to "militarized police" last summer will now return to their previous tut-tutting over obstreperous people of color.

Breitbart.com's Ben Shapiro also condemns "the media’s attempted racial assassination of Officer Darren Wilson." But even though Wilson got off, Shapiro remains so terrified of black people that he perceives President Obama's after-verdict speech, universally acknowledged as milquetoast, as having "fueled the flames for future racial conflagrations... Obama doesn't want to prevent crime," etc. And the column is topped by the most ooga-booga picture of Obama Breitbart.com could find. I expect if Obama sneezed Shapiro would consider it biological warfare against Caucasians.

It's almost worse when they make a feeble pretense of caring. "I am trying to see this through the eyes of those I disagree with," claims Jonah Goldberg, by which he means allowing as how it's too bad Michael Brown's family lost their boy before starting this rhetorical pee-dance:
Beyond that, I think critics who see Robert McCulloch as too pro-police have a point. Or at least I can see where they are coming from. His statement tonight was very powerful and very persuasive, but not what you would expect from a prosecutor in other circumstances. If McCulloch wanted an indictment, I think he could have gotten one (prosecutors and ham sandwiches and all that). Whether he should have gotten one is open to debate. I certainly think you could make the case that the country would be better off in the long run if there was an open and transparent public trial. On the other hand, we don’t have trials of innocent men simply for appearances’ sake. Having a trial just for show is too close to a show trial as far as I’m concerned.
That's it. Goldberg's prose reminds me of how, when you toss a coin on a hard surface, it rattles side-to-side with increasing speed before coming to a dead stop. (Later Goldberg makes fun of a guy who felt sorry for the kids who mugged him. Must've been a relief for him to drop the brief pretense of empathy.)

I should also mention National Review's Andrew C. McCarthy, who thinks Republican Administrations can torture suspects if they like and who insists that you can impeach Obama for spitting on the sidewalk, suddenly arguing for prosecutorial restraint now that it appears a rare instance of it got Wilson off.

But really, it's no better or worse than what they usually come up with when a white guy gets away with killing a black guy. And there's no reason why it would change, so long as there's a political upside to it.

UPDATE. Good for some grim laughs: The comments thread on a riot post at Reason, flagship publication of conservatives who identify as libertarians. The consensus at present is that it's all Al Sharpton's fault ("This is certainly one of those issues that reasonable people can agree upon....that is, it's being pumped up by the race baiters and media and others who make a buck off tragedy").

UPDATE 2. Speaking of which, a Republican Senator appears in Time, blames Ferguson on the War on Poverty, and peddles the traditional marriage-makes-you-rich bullshit...
The link between poverty, lack of education, and children outside of marriage is staggering and cuts across all racial groups. Statistics uniformly show that waiting to have children in marriage and obtaining an education are an invaluable part of escaping poverty. 
...as well as bootstrap philosophy...
While a hand-up can be part of the plan, if the plan doesn’t include the self-discovery of education, work, and the self-esteem that comes with work, the cycle of poverty will continue.
But in an exciting twist, he mixes this ancient bunk with promises to end the drug war -- aw yeah, you caught on, it's Rand Paul, trying to maintain his libertarian USP in the GOP while talking traditional culture-scold rot. Well, what the hell, it's all just marketing anyway -- you might even say it's Uber for social conservatism!

Monday, November 24, 2014

PEOPLE YAKETY-YAK A STREAK AND WASTE YOUR TIME OF DAY...

Well, I see New York magazine interviewed a guy who fucks horses. I like to think the whole thing was designed as a practical joke on Rod Dreher, known for his eruptions over such evanescent prurientia as 2 Girls 1 Cup (remember that?); if so, mission accomplished!
I’m not linking to it, because it is sick, sick stuff. It’s incredibly graphic, and I had decided not to write about it. But...
Yeah, we can guess, preacher man. Or can we? Let's see where Brother Rod takes it:
What’s significant is not that this deranged behavior happens. It has no doubt always been with us. What’s significant is that this interview appears in a mainstream magazine... 
New York has won a slew of National Magazine Awards, including being named 2013′s Magazine of the Year. This isn’t an Al Goldstein rag. This isn’t even the Village Voice.
Yeah, the Voice published Roy Edroso and homos, but New York is a recent award winner! Its pages are glossy! Also, Robert George agrees with Dreher, and don't you pointy-heads discount George because he's writing on Facebook -- discount him because he's a weirdo who favors the anatomical-doll school of Adam and Stevery ("In coitus, but not in other forms of sexual contact, a man and a woman’s bodies coordinate by way of their sexual organs... they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together..."). George shares Dreher's disgust, and demands action:
I mention it, reluctantly, only to show that anyone who thought we had already reached the bottom of the slippery slope is mistaken. The descent into Gomorrah continues. I believe it can be reversed, but not simply stopped. “This far and no farther,” is not an option.
Hear hear, says Dreher, because we wouldn't have horse-fucking in glossy magazines if you non-reproductive bit-rubbers hadn't gotten the slope all slippery:
Ideas have consequences. If your idea is that all consensual sex is good, or at least beyond judgment, and that sexual desire is its own justification, then you have met your consequence in New York‘s anonymous zoophile.
 "Dogs and cats, living together" was not a JOKE, people! Soon everybody, human and animal, will be friggin' and frugin' and sticking their bits wherever they can, unless we reverse the flow! THANKS OBAMA!

UPDATE: Isn't it obvious now that the famous pervert Woody Allen was trying to normalize this kind of behavior?


UPDATE 2. A winning comment right out of the gate by Glock H. Palin, Esq.: "Sure, rural people do it, and have been doing it since before this was a country, but those godless heather urban types write about it. Is there no end to their depravity?!" Oh Glock, you don't know the half of it -- one of Dreher's commenters actually cites Ike Snopes and the cow from The Hamlet ("the whole passage pretty much turned me off Faulkner forever. Yes, I know Faulkner is considered 'literature'...") and betrays no awareness that farmers fucking livestock was not invented by Faulkner, but is part of the great American agrarian tradition.

Friday, November 21, 2014

GREETINGS FROM OCCUPIED DC!

The atmosphere is tense here in Washington as the Tyrant ObamaHitler has sent his brownshirts into the streets in a show of force...

Yeah, it's a bunch of bullshit, but at least we have the pleasure of watching wingnuts try to make hay of it. My favorite in the Ray of Hope category so far is this post from Andrew Johnson at National Review:
Univision announced earlier this week that it would delay its broadcast of the Latin Grammys to air President Obama’s announcement to use executive action to grant legal status to immigrants in the country illegally. While some saw it as a politically calculated move by the administration to reach a largely Hispanic audience, some viewers weren’t too happy to see the president rather than their favorite celebrities.
Then Johnson showed dozens -- excuse me, a dozen (well, almost) -- tweets from fans who were disgruntled that the show had been delayed, and who will no doubt be surprised to find themselves on a GOP mailing list and being asked to contribute to a Stop Tyrant Obama and His Messicans drive.

UPDATE. I should have realized -- no one out-crazys Ophelia WorldNetDaily!


Oh God this is so great:
Ted Cruz said it best in a Wall Street Journal piece following Barack Hussein Obama’s State of the Union Address earlier this year: “Dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. When a president can pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore, he is no longer a president"... 
I would go one further than Cruz: Obama has never been my president. I have steadfastly refused to acknowledge him as such. He is undeserving of the honorific. To this day, I am unconvinced he is even eligible for office... 
But that’s a can of worms few want to reopen – besides Donald Trump and me... 
I hereby join Ted Cruz in declaring Obama is no longer president.
Alan Keyes is going "And I thought I would be the winner in any crazy competition! I better step up my game!" and driving nails into his own skull.

UPDATE 2. Robert Tracinski (best known as a rhapsodist for the softer side of Ayn Rand) at The Federalist:

The ironic thing is that the media and Hollywood types have always convinced themselves, as George Lucas did, that their villains were metaphors for George W. Bush or a cautionary tale about the evils of the right. But here we are, the Old Republic is being dissolved, and it’s their hero who is doing it. They find themselves on the side of the Empire. (Or the Alliance. Yes, I’m looking at you, Joss Whedon.)
I think they should stop using words at all, and just make videos of themselves playing with their nerd dolls: "Don't worry Princess Leia, here comes G.I. Ted Cruz to save you, psshew, psshew," etc.

UPDATE 3. OK, one more: J. Christian Adams at PJ Media:
Take some comfort in this: executives acting lawlessly is a transgression as old as human history. Charles I similarly ignored the law when he went so far as to dissolve a Parliament with which he disagreed. When he started running out of money to conduct his wars with France and Spain, he violated Magna Carta by imposing a forced loan on the monarchs without the consent of Parliament.
And then they cut his head off! Get it? Well, maybe one of those nuts who seem to drop by the White House with a gun every couple of days will "take some comfort" from that story.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

RHETORIC LEVEL ADVISORY: SEVERE.

Well, now that Obama is fixin' to give the Founding Fathers a Dirty Sanchez by handing driver's licenses to Messicans, let's see how the brethren are talking it down. Clash Daily:
HOW CONVENIENT: Obama to Grant Amnesty on Mexican Revolution Day 
Coincidence? I don’t think so. This is all part of “fundamentally transforming” America...
At dawn the car horns will play "La Cucaracha," and over the ridge they'll come -- thousands of low-riders led by Salma Hayek and George Lopez. And Rick Perry will be powerless to act! Here's a passage from an Instigator News essay with the something-for-everyone title, "Pavlov, Orwell, Alinsky, Hitler, and Obama: A Synthesis of Evil":
I offer here just a few points from an early platform of Hitler’s Nazi Party, courtesy of The History Place. With the exceptions regarding Germany’s nationalism and disdain for immigrants, they’re almost identical to the policies we’ve seen proposed and/or enacted by the Obama administration.
The Messican piece is Obama's way of making Nazism his own, see -- he's a great cover artist as well as history's greatest monster!

OK, that's fun, but come on, these are bottom feeders; surely no one legitimate is saying such stupid--


-- Huh. Well, guy's an American Spectator writer, that's still pretty fringe. The really big boys know it's ix-nay on the itler-Hay until this impeachment thing gets a little traction. Thus, Rich Lowry at Politico:
Barack Obama, American Caudillo
See? It even sounds Messican!
The last 400 years of Anglo-American political history...
He ain't just a traitor to America, he's a traitor to Anglo-America!
...can be read as a successful effort to establish and maintain a system tethering the executive to the law. What President Obama is contemplating will undermine that achievement, both through his own lawlessness and the precedent he will create for subsequent presidents to operate by extra-legal fiat.
Well, excluding presidents who already figured out how to get some bright fella to write them a Get-Out-of-Den-Haag-Free card, anyway.

The rest of them are just using regular Republican slurs, like "tyrant" and "emperor," but with a few twists to wring extra juice out of them. Take for example Damon Linker's essay, "On immigration, Obama is flirting with tyranny," in which, after getting the accusations of destroying democracy out of the way, Linker explains that this Messican thing is even worse than Bush's possibly illegal torture, because when it comes to torture "such judgments can only be fairly rendered once the state of emergency has come to an end," but everybody knows there's no rush about these illegals, they'll just keep on skulking between landscaping gigs and food banks forever. Also:
Compared with torture, rendition, and the extrajudicial use of surveillance and even deadly force against American citizens, Obama's efforts to help illegal immigrants can seem benign and even trivial. But that's precisely the point. No matter how you feel about Bush's actions, up until now, executive transgressions of the law have been made in the name of protecting the common good from a grave threat in a time of emergency.
I have to admit, I like to think I know these guys, but telling readers to try and be reasonable about the Black Sites while calling Obama a tyrant is one I completely did not see coming.

UPDATE. Shit, how'd I miss this -- Burt Prelutsky at Bernard Goldberg's site, on previous casus bellow Jonathan Gruber:
All in all, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it has to be more than mere coincidence that “Gruber” sounds like “goober” and that Adolf Hitler’s birth name happened to have been Schicklgruber.
CONNECT THE DOTS SHEEPLE

MIKE NICHOLS, 1931-2014.

When I heard he was dead, I recalled that I'd seen his production of Streamers at Lincoln Center years ago; only later did I notice that he'd also directed the original Broadway production of The Gin Game, which I'd also seen (with E.G. Marshall in for Hume Cronyn, but Jessica Tandy still playing). 10 years ago (!) I made a mean gag about Nichols being "a one-man major entertainment institution for ninety years," because that's really how it seemed; he was always around, even when you didn't notice until someone gave him an award for it.

Those two New York productions were brilliant, but like most of you I know Nichols best from his movies. As Bruce Weber mentioned in the Times today, he was sort of an anti-auteur; you couldn't really pick out obsessions and motifs from his work like you could with Kubrick or Scorsese. He was more like George Cukor, a hard worker who knew that when inspiration failed elbow grease would do. And like Cukor he served the material. He served Edward Albee as well with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as he did Charles Webb with The Graduate; if the latter is fussier, it's just that Webb's deadpan angst needed more active intervention than Albee's masterpiece.

Maybe some clue to Nichols' true feelings, in lieu of auteur signifiers and whatnot, resides in two of his crazier, more misanthropic efforts: the eco-downer The Day of the Dolphin, and Wolf, a jaundiced (one might say hepatitic) midlife fantasy, redolent of Tom Wolfe but much more fun if no more convincing. If so, it's just as well he turned the generosity of his talent to other authors. For me his sweet spot is Carnal Knowledge -- and I wish there were a YouTube of the scene where Jonathan thinks he's going to date-swap and gets a double whammy instead; it's not as flashy as the available showstopper clips, but it has the advantage of being perfect. But it's also worth remembering that he started out as a comedy sketch artist -- just like Adam Sandler, and how's that for a flattering comparison -- and worth watching those old Nichols and May bits not just for the laughs, which are still there, but also to see him and Elaine May learning on their feet how the game works.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

YOUR MOMENT OF OOGA BOOGA.

The recent election has given some of the brethren the idea that they can continue to win elections without black votes. This stirs Michael Barone to analysis (the Democrats' "core groups," the "gentry liberals and blacks," he says, are suffering from "geographic and cultural isolation" from real Americans -- one might even say [puts on sunglasses] they've been segregated [YEEA-AAAAH]),  and Heather Mac Donald to, oh, the same horrible shit she always does, only worse, with the aid of the National Review editorial staff:

This Mandingette's black rage is so strong, its blowback has actually turned the police into harmless blurs! Among Mac Donald's choice bits:
No one is “bracing,” in press parlance, for white riots or police violence should Officer Wilson be indicted... 
Normal, as well, is the sickening sense of dread with which one awaits another possible outbreak of black rage... 
The Obama administration has lent its prestige to this conceit, charging, for instance, that the elevated rate of black school suspensions reflects administrator and teacher bias. The disproportionate rate of black students’ misbehavior is left completely out of the anti-discipline crusade, just as the disproportionate rate of black crime is ignored when the media, the White House, and academics discuss allegedly racist police activity and incarceration...
Well, guess it's time for Rand Paul to give another speech at a historically-black college!

UPDATE. In comments, mortimer2000 explains that "any random paragraph of MacDonald's bullshit needs a few additions to make it even remotely pertinent" and does some glossing on her current offering:
No one is “bracing,” in press parlance, for white riots or police violence should Officer Wilson be indicted [not even for all of Wilson's gun-toting racist supporters -- why is that?]. Nor were there preparations for Asian riots last month in Los Angeles as a jury heard a murder case against a 22-year-old [not-a-cop] thug from South Central L.A. [who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole], who, along with an [not-a-cop] accomplice [who was also sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole], had shot two Chinese engineering students attending the University of Southern California in 2012.
It should also be mentioned that Mac Donald accepts the most cop-friendly interpretation of events in the Brown case as the irrefutable truth, and affects surprise that any black folks would see things differently:  "One might think that it would be good news if Wilson did not initiate the violent encounter or shoot Brown in cold blood: It would mean one less instance of alleged police brutality." Similarly, what if all those old-timers volunteered to work on those cotton plantations? You just have to know how to look at it!

SHIRTHEAD.

Regarding Matt Taylor, I couldn't give a shit about the shirt. As a punk rocker I wore plenty of offensive t-shirts and, while I no longer completely support such chest-borne sentiments as "No Money No Honey," I give my young self a pass because 1.) my business, like Taylor's, had nothing to do with creating a more enlightened society, and 2.) Fuck you.

Of course, Taylor's critics have every right to complain about his shirt; that does not make them thought police, as (also of course) various wingnuts have portrayed them, apparently in hopes of cementing the fledgling alliance between the conservative and Men's Rights movements, thus building the crotchswell of resentment needed for a big White Man victory in '16.

It's a sad situation -- but, as experience has taught us, Jonah Goldberg can always make it worse:
Many of my friends and colleagues on the anti-PC right have responded with understandable outrage. And it’s true: Taylor’s confession of wrongdoing did feel forced — awfully North Korean. 
Still, the feminists have a point.
Oh, no, no...
Although I like the shirt (which is now selling like hotcakes), I would never wear it to a nice restaurant, never mind on a globally broadcast TV interview. The reason I wouldn’t wear it has very little to do with my fear of offending feminists. It’s simply unsuitable professional attire. I’d ask critics of the feminist backlash, would you wear it on a job interview? How about to church or synagogue?
Being influenced by ladies' preferences in menswear is Orwellian; you should instead be influenced by Jonah Goldberg's sense of decorum; he wears a shirt and tie every day, though being a legacy pledge he doesn't have to; its about Burke and little pantaloons or something (fart).

Apparently for Goldberg the real outrage is that bitches be Occupying his moral superiority:
But why are feminist motives so special? What if you’re a devout Christian, Muslim, or Jew working in the humanities? What if you like cartoonishly sexy ladies, but you hate guns? What if you’re simply the kind of person who thinks male professionals should wear a jacket and tie on TV?
Also, what if you have a serious uniform fetish? Feminists are so thoughtless.

As is traditional, Goldberg finds himself out of ideas but with more space to fill, and so drifts into the gas clouds of Uranus, telling us "diversity comes at a cost" and no one knows how to dress anymore:
In this age of unprecedented cultural liberty, we’ve lost sight of the fact that common standards of decency and decorum can be liberating. They inconvenience everyone — a little — but they also free us from worrying about who we might offend or why. School uniforms, remember, constrain the wealthy kids for the benefit of the poor ones.
[blink] [blink] School uniforms constrain... the...

Let us leave off. Sometimes the works of the immortals cannot be analyzed; we can only marvel at them, silent upon a peak in Derpian.

Monday, November 17, 2014

WITH THEIR SPITTIN' AND THEIR ANTICS...

National Review's Tim Cavanaugh does an obit for Glen Larson, the TV producer who died recently. One of Larson's shows was "Quincy, M.E.," which gives Cavanaugh an opportunity to correct the record on a malign social influence from years past:
While Quincy has a claim to being the progenitor of the CSI shows, the tools at Klugman’s crime-solving disposal now appear medieval, and the show is today mostly remembered for “Next Stop Nowhere” a late-period episode in which Quincy saves a troubled teen from the clutches of L.A.’s then-thriving punk rock culture. Made long after social causes of the week and Klugman’s penchant for soppy lecturing had begun to capsize the series, the fabled punk rock episode serves as an ironic touchstone for aging hipsters keen to remember when they were all scary and hilarious. On a fresh viewing, however, “Next Stop Nowhere” paints a fully true picture of punk rockers as they really were: deceitful social predators who wouldn’t think twice about framing you for murder and forcing you into a codeine overdose.
Always fighting the last culture war, these guys. But where do they stand on beatniks?