Whiskey Fire

You Could Get with This, Or You Could Get with That

In case you were wondering what it would take to "be ostracized by the entire conservative movement," you could, apparently, stock a boat full of dildos. Or else you could gesture in the direction of science.

Dildos and science. Those are your options if you're considering ostracization. Uh, choose wisely.

Having the Same Effect, Without Ever Knowing Why

Evan Hurst passes along something cold and sad.

Seth Walsh, a California teen who spent the better part of the last 10 days on life support after attempting suicide over relentless bullying because he was gay, died today. He was 13 years old.

As Evan mournfully points out, this is not remotely an isolated story. And you could add this nightmare that Atrios linked earlier.

I do think things are changing -- but too slow, too slow.

Too deadly slow.

What is worse than the death of a child? As a parent, I cannot contemplate. That in America, children are hounded to suicide because of who they are is a shocking scandal, or it should be.

That it isn't, exactly, tells us a lot about America Right Now.

(This was the best vid I could find for Hamell's "Matthew Shepard" [whoops, meant "Hail"] sorry about the garbling... Actual song here, the other kids mentioned in the lyrics explained in the vid. Hamell is right that the viciousness of gender & sexual codes surely hurts gay kids worst, but there is also a lot of collateral damage. You don't even have to be gay to be gay bashed, you just have to be different. Maybe someday we will all grow up. I doubt it, but maybe.)

 

Freakshow

I can't imagine why James O'Keefe and his pals were ever worried for a minute about the MSM making them look like a bunch of paranoid sexist freaks.

A conservative activist known for making undercover videos plotted to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating "palace of pleasure" and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.

James O'Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.

The most fascinating part:

According to the document, O'Keefe was to record a video of the following script before Boudreau arrived: "My name is James. I work in video activism and journalism. I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: they want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....

"Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath.

"Please sit back and enjoy the show."

How dare you suggest the American Right is filled wih unprofessional crazies, bitch.

(The "bigots of some sort" here, by the way, would be "misogynists.")

Spoil Their Fun

Perhaps this Jonah Goldberg column is not stupid! Could be!

Stephen Colbert's "testimony" before Congress last week was a clear sign that ironic rot (if you've got a better term, let me know) is sinking into the foundation of our political system.

Damn. It looks like it will be another stupid Jonah Goldberg column after all. Whoever could have figured what are the odds I am flabbergasted and disbelieving.

Commentary provided in all caps because that is the proper idiom for Jonah Goldberg commentary: literal garbage pelting is impractical insofar as (a) who wants to get that close? & (b) he'd just eat it anyhow.

Irony or post-irony or ironic post-whatever has been metastasizing through the culture for decades. The most famous example was "Seinfeld," a hilarious show that was famously "about nothing" and much-derided by earnest writers on the left and right for its detached mockery of any deeply held principle or conviction.

IRONY! SEINFELD! NO DEEPLY HELD PRINCIPLE OR CONVICTION! HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

But it hardly began with "Seinfeld." David Letterman launched a talk show that made fun of talk shows. Before that, "Saturday Night Live" crafted brilliant fake commercials and newscasts (which, sadly, are the only reliably funny parts of the show these days).

DAVID LETTERMAN! SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE! IRONY! DISSING SNL FOR NOT BEING FUNNY! CUTTING EDGE CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS!

In the 1990s, Washington fell in love with Hollywood in an unprecedented way. In countless films, politicians, reporters and pundits played themselves. There was also an influential, and occasionally funny, sitcom called "Murphy Brown" that jumped back and forth from make-believe to reality. Things got particularly confusing when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the show for glamorizing out-of-wedlock birth, and the show's creators responded by having the fictional Murphy Brown whine about personal attacks on her lifestyle.

HOLY SHIT "MURPHY FUCKING BROWN" KILL ME!

Things got outright weird with the creation of "The Daily Show," a fake news program hosted by Jon Stewart since 1999 that often provides some of the best (and occasionally the worst) criticism of American politics and is revered on the left as somehow newsier than news. For what it's worth, a senior Republican congressmen told me that a "Daily Show" piece on the GOP "Pledge to America" was the only one that drew blood.

PROBABLY BECAUSE OF HOW THE DAILY SHOW IS ALL ABOUT THE IRONIC LACK OF PRINCIPLE OR CONVICTION PROBABLY! OR ARE WE SUPPOSED TO HAVE FORGOTTEN THE STUPID THESIS YET...?

"The Daily Show" begat "The Colbert Report," in which Colbert plays a jingoistic, know-it-all, borderline bigot whose standard for veracity can be summarized with the word "truthiness."

In other words, he pretends to be what many liberals claim Bill O'Reilly is. That's the joke, get it?

It was this Stephen Colbert who was invited to testify before a House judiciary subcommittee on immigration and labor. It was an excruciatingly inappropriate spectacle. "This is America," Colbert inveighed. "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican."

But who, exactly, is Colbert parodying here? O'Reilly doesn't talk like that. Nor does Sean Hannity or any of the usual targets Colbert's supposed to be lampooning. The real upshot of Colbert's shtick is that he's mocking people who disagree with him -- or with the left-wing base of the Democratic Party -- on the complicated issue of immigration.

UH... HOLD ON...

All right, dropping the allcaps along with the jaws. The American Right does not demagogue Mexican immigration? Here is an exclamation point: !

"How dare you mock this feather in my ass, because, why, I have no feather in my ass, and also, in making fun of this feather in my ass, you reveal that you are the True Assfeather Bigot!"

BACK TO ALLCAPS.

This was made abundantly clear by the sober testimony of Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor of law and political science, who argued quite effectively that a steady flow of cheap migrant labor depresses wages for poor blacks and other American workers while keeping working conditions grim.

Though Colbert would obviously deny it, his testimony amounted to calling Swain -- an African-American woman of very humble background -- an ignorant bigot, because her analysis runs counter to the liberal party line.

I WILL NOT BOTHER TO RESPOND TO OR EVEN ADMIT THE EXISTENCE OF COLBERT'S SUBSTANTIVE COMMENTS, AND HELLO, WHO KNEW, THE GOP HAS A USE FOR POOR BLACK PEOPLE AFTER ALL!

Colbert's defenders point to the fact that other celebrities have testified before Congress. "I would like to point out," Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) noted during the hearing, "that in the past the Republicans have had witnesses such as Loretta Swit, who played 'Hot Lips' Houlihan from 'MASH,' to testify on crush videos." True enough. But she didn't testify as "Hot Lips."

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. COLBERT ACTUALLY DID SPEAK FROM CONVICTION, THE AMERICAN RIGHT JUST DOES NOT LIKE THAT SOMEONE CAN MAKE THE MORAL CASE FOR OPPRESSED FARMWORKERS EFFECTIVELY, BECAUSE THE AMERICAN RIGHT ARE BASICALLY ASSHOLES.

On Oct. 30, Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" will join Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" on the National Mall. They will rationalize the stunts as send-ups and putdowns of all that is wrong with our politics. But by slowly degenerating from satire into plain old mockery, these guys are slowly becoming too-clever-by-half versions of the very people they claim to deplore.

Well, Jonah's deplorable, but he is far too thick to be vulnerable to satire, that's for sure. You just can't be too clever for halfwits, is the problem.

 

Animation Torchcarriers

Assrocket explains Jesus!

This is the point I want to make: Biblical precepts are often twisted by liberals to support socialism. Jesus was not a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disclaimed any political agenda.

He is roused to explain Galt God to the idiots who take his crap seriously because Obama spoke heresy worser than Catharism.

"So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead — being my brothers' and sisters' keeper, treating others as they would treat me," he continued.

Assrocket, who is inferior to Thomas Aquinas only in the categories of being stupid and not being dead, points out the Errors here.

Obama's answer causes one to suspect that he would be among those who, as in the Pew poll that is also in the news today, would have trouble answering basic questions about his own religion. The Golden Rule is a fine idea, but it is not a principle of Christianity. Nor did Jesus ever say that we should be our brothers' and sisters' keepers; Obama apparently referred to the story of Cain and Abel....

the moral of the story in Genesis is not that we are, or should be, our brothers' keepers. Rather, the phrase comes from Cain's answer when God asks him the whereabouts of his brother Abel, whom Cain has just killed. Cain denies any knowledge, and adds the self-exculpatory question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" The point of the story is not that Cain was responsible for looking after Abel, like an Old Testament Nancy Pelosi. Cain was condemned not for failing to keep watch over his brother, but for killing him.

Barack Obama is hardly the only liberal who misapplies scripture to support liberal politics, but his answer today provides a useful opportunity to set the record straight.

Very clever. I'm not myself religious, for which I think the Jesuits, sincerely. But whatever. If you ignore the theological nitpicking, playing along at home, what Assrocket has just said, explicitly, is two things:

--The Golden Rule ("do unto others as you would like done unto you, or just stop being a jerk") is ANTI-CHRISTIAN and SOCIALIST, and:

-- The notion that you are responsible for the welfare of others is ANTI-CHRISTIAN and SOCIALIST.

To which it might replied "let's hear it for anti-Christian socialism." Or else, "damn, at least Ayn Rand had the intellectual integrity to not pretend to be religious, congratulations, 21st century American Right, you are more morally and intellectually debased than Ayn Rand, uh... huzzah?"

Which is hardly news, but it's always entertaining to see Assrocket attempting to "think" in public.

I Get the Joke

Jammies Media Genius Ed Driscoll explains an otherwise Dark n' Impenetrable Deeply Mysterious Mystery, namely, why anyone ever got into their heads the wacky idea that Paul Krugman knows anything about economics.

Also he dislikes Christine Amanpour because she founded Al Qaeda and also works for the Democratic Party, but I repeat myself (sounds of thousands of meaty thighs meatily slapped in squealy delight). 

Driscoll has an auspicious start:

As Ace of Spades noted a couple of years ago, MSM blargle smellmyfarts.

Approximately. The gist is that the Washington Post is "Establishment Liberal" despite Iraq because duh. This logically becomes:

And by that standard, Paul Krugman and Christiane Amanpour are the MSM’s new centrist flag bearers.

Shazam! We know that Amapour is Wicked because of the Very Liberal WaPo columnist Tom Shales, who writes for the WaPo so you know he hates the American Right, his dislike of Amanpour being based on nothing besides the American Right disliking her notwithstanding: those Establishment Liberals are tricky buggers. Also Driscoll links to Commentary's Jennifer Rubin, who says "smellmyfarts blargle MSM."

The evidence against Krugman is even more damning, in that at that his New York Times blog wingnuts are only allowed a certain amount of tedious comments section spamming, and also that Krugman laughably claimed once that government spending can end an economic downturn by -- get this -- citing World War II! Which is crazy! Paul Krugman is probably high! On drugs!

Anyway Driscoll tells us solemnly that according to Glenn Reynolds, both the Obama White House and the Bush White House hate Krugman because of his criticisms from the Left, which, if you put that together wuth the fact that in the Left Blogosphere you can also find criticism of Obama from the Left, proves conclusively that both Obama and CNN are at best Trotsky but really they're Stalin.

Or something.

Driscoll is of course just a garden-variety wingnut git. But contemplate his gibberish for a minute and ruminate on what it means that to an awful lot of powerful vested interests in this country right now, two incredibly dangerous ideas are that Keynes might have had a point, and that maybe it should be all right to gently criticize Israel.

Called to the Plough

Are American Conservatives remotely capable of caring about migrant farmworkers? Ha ha that is funny.

Comedian Jon Stewart's "Restoring Sanity" rally pokes fun at overzealous political activism, but it's hard not to see how it doesn't attack the Right more than it attacks the Left.

Uh, yeah. How unfair.

After all, "Restoring Sanity" is a direct play on Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" event just a few weeks ago, and the format of Stewart's event is taken directly from the tea party rallies held over the past year or so. Should tea-partying conservatives actually take offense? It depends who you talk to.

Should "tea-partying conservatives" actually not die of acute self-inflicted nasal-crayon asphyxiation? Let's experiment!

That opinion is quite different than the one expressed by Sally Oljar, a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, a limited-government grassroots activist group that has assisted with several events over the past year. “I am reminded of Gandhi's advice: ‘First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.’ Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert are comics and do not address issues substantively,” said Oljar. “Mockery is a tactic, not an answer. They are desperate to stop the change that's coming – the showdown, so to speak.”

"Gahndi started out laughing at you and remains convinced you're a dick."

Those sorts of signs didn’t really hit Seton Motley’s funny bone. Motley is the President of Less Government, a nonprofit group in D.C. “One of the premises of this Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert pseudo-Woodstock is to denigrate to the tea party movement and conservatives,” said Motley. “Their calling it a rally to ‘restore’ sanity implies that the TEA Party and Glenn Beck rallies have been un-sane.”

"Implies?" Uh, yeah.

 

 

Sha Na Na Na Na Sha Na Na Na Na Get A Job!

Not as dense as Chuck Norris or Pat Boone, but even less known, a guy from Sha Na Na has typed furiously in hisat PJs Media. Let's get some show bidness insider insight from ... from, um, oh — Donny York!

We've no more idea than you if D.Y. is in this shot.

Call and response does energize a crowd. Obama wasn’t the first to deploy it, only the first to deploy it with such momentous success. In the unknown future of our constitutional republic, call n’ response is as here to stay as rock n’ roll. Crowds still matter, even in the cyberspace age. Acting together physically is still how the homo sapiens do it, and any ruling class of the species still takes heed. 

The method of call and response and of group chanting or singing may be powerful, even dignified, as in “We Shall Overcome.”  Or may be lame, even embarrassing, as in “Whadya want?”… “When d’ya want it?” and the like. People participating in call and response or in sing-along reveal things about their character: Faith? Anxiousness? Selfishness? Opportunism?

Alright, dig at Obama; not a racist though (referred to "We Shall Overcome"); used the inane "ruling class" thing they want to make a "meme" of. Then: What? Reread, same question: Huh? About to lose me, but there's a cartoon. To save you the agony of clicking, I'll post it here. WARNING: "Donny York, one of the founders of ShaNaNa, has gotten the fever and rewritten the oldie "Bread and Butter" for today's tea party movement." Also: York claims that Pat Boone sings on it! (Did not know that when I name-checked P.B. above.) And (final warning): It's pretty damn loud, workers beware! And more half-baked babble. Further reading indicates this guy is about as simple as Mr. Norris, but short on the specific paranoia. Heavy on the Rand though. Dirty, filthy fucking hippies! Wake up & smell the coffee & cigarettes!!

Hasn’t it ever dawned on you that our “peace” and Yasgur’s Farm demonstration of the viability of socialism were dependent on a life-support umbilical cord from the Nixon era capitalist grown-ups? 

Didn’t you ever come to notice how the robust creation of wealth must be assured before any conversation about its redistribution can even be useful? 

To those of my Woodstock cohort who are now aghast at the “tea party” (which more assuredly has “changed the world” than it’s said our misadventure at Yasgur’s farm did) I return that stunned glare, then the sputter: “But…  I thought you were smart. I thought you were a nice person!” Being a nice person aligns with being in the fight for the nicest societal arrangement, among all of human history’s rarest gems: limited government.

Like, dig it, man. Some of today’s teapartyers are grown up flower children.  Imagine there’s no statism.  It’s easy if you try. They may say you’re a dreamer. But you’re not the only one.

A co-founder and lifelong member of ShaNaNa, Donny York took his political science degree in 1971 from Columbia University, under the same faculty that graduated Eric Holder in 1973 and Barack Obama in 1983. Inquirers may obtain his detailed student transcript from the Registrar’s office.

Why look, another subtle Obama dig. The very same faculty! And central to the point of liberal indoctrination in those ivied halls of yada, innit? 

Most people become infatuated w/ Rand in adolescence & grow out of it. Is Donny's dedication to the imagined past causing him to live backward through time? A veritable Merlin.

M. Bouffant again.

Sha Na Na Na Na Sha Na Na Na Na Get A Job!

Not as dense as Chuck Norris or Pat Boone, but even less known, a guy from Sha Na Na has typed furiously in hisat PJs Media. Let's get some show bidness insider insight from ... from, um, oh — Donny York!

We've no more idea than you if D.Y. is in this shot.

Call and response does energize a crowd. Obama wasn’t the first to deploy it, only the first to deploy it with such momentous success. In the unknown future of our constitutional republic, call n’ response is as here to stay as rock n’ roll. Crowds still matter, even in the cyberspace age. Acting together physically is still how the homo sapiens do it, and any ruling class of the species still takes heed. 

The method of call and response and of group chanting or singing may be powerful, even dignified, as in “We Shall Overcome.”  Or may be lame, even embarrassing, as in “Whadya want?”… “When d’ya want it?” and the like. People participating in call and response or in sing-along reveal things about their character: Faith? Anxiousness? Selfishness? Opportunism?

Alright, dig at Obama; not a racist though (referred to "We Shall Overcome"); used the inane "ruling class" thing they want to make a "meme" of. Then: What? Reread, same question: Huh? About to lose me, but there's a cartoon. To save you the agony of clicking, I'll post it here. WARNING: "Donny York, one of the founders of ShaNaNa, has gotten the fever and rewritten the oldie "Bread and Butter" for today's tea party movement." Also: York claims that Pat Boone sings on it! (Did not know that when I name-checked P.B. above.) And more half-baked babble. Further reading indicates this guy is about as simple as Mr. Norris, but short on the specific paranoia. Heavy on the Rand though. Dirty, filthy fucking hippies! Wake up & smell the coffee & cigarettes!!

Hasn’t it ever dawned on you that our “peace” and Yasgur’s Farm demonstration of the viability of socialism were dependent on a life-support umbilical cord from the Nixon era capitalist grown-ups? 

Didn’t you ever come to notice how the robust creation of wealth must be assured before any conversation about its redistribution can even be useful? 

To those of my Woodstock cohort who are now aghast at the “tea party” (which more assuredly has “changed the world” than it’s said our misadventure at Yasgur’s farm did) I return that stunned glare, then the sputter: “But…  I thought you were smart. I thought you were a nice person!” Being a nice person aligns with being in the fight for the nicest societal arrangement, among all of human history’s rarest gems: limited government.

Like, dig it, man. Some of today’s teapartyers are grown up flower children.  Imagine there’s no statism.  It’s easy if you try. They may say you’re a dreamer. But you’re not the only one.

A co-founder and lifelong member of ShaNaNa, Donny York took his political science degree in 1971 from Columbia University, under the same faculty that graduated Eric Holder in 1973 and Barack Obama in 1983. Inquirers may obtain his detailed student transcript from the Registrar’s office.

Why look, another subtle Obama dig. The very same faculty! And central to the point of liberal indoctrination in those ivied halls of yada, innit? 

Most people become infatuated w/ Rand in adolescence & grow out of it. Is Donny's dedication to the imagined past causing him to live backward through time? A veritable Merlin.

M. Bouffant again.

Standing Athwart History W/ Its Thumb Up Your Ass

I don't know or care who this dip is, though he is linked often enough by the Usual Gang of Idiots at The Atlantic. (Gangleader Sullivan, for example, dragged this before my eyes.) 

I think it is easy for some liberals to miss just how antagonising flip mockery of absurd religious beliefs can be, though it's hard to believe they don't, at some level, grasp what's at stake. To laugh at someone's views on the evils of masturbation or witchcraft or gay marriage is clearly to imply that these views, and the people who hold them, deserve to be laughed at and, thereby, diminished.

Sweet fucking blood of Jesus, what other possible reaction is there? The typist himself admits these beliefs are absurd. Does he wish to be ruled/led/manipulated (however you care to describe the dynamics of human politics) by the patently absurd? 

Oh crap. Read Douthat's bullshit about liberals loving the culture war, thought it garbage but decided not to bother. Now I realize this is part & parcel of that. (W.W.: "Mr Douthat makes an excellent point.") What've I gotten myself into? Well, fuck, good money after bad, eh? Let's break it down. Confusion follows:

It is easy to believe that Fox News is so popular among conservatives simply because it caters to their prejudices. But another way of saying almost the same thing is to say that it treats conservatives with the respect they feel they deserve; it asserts on their behalf a claim to social status that acknowledges the efforts of liberals to weaken that claim, all the while encouraging pride in the identity-constituting affiliations and convictions liberals seem to disdain.

No, no, liberals are all identity politics & resentment of their betters by minorities the libs keep on some pseudo-metaphorical "plantation." Noble conservatives judge by individual character & reject identity-constituting affiliation. Didn't he get the memo?

One really has to wonder how such clear summings-up of reality lead to 180°-wrong conclusions. Again & again.

Unlike liberalism, social/moral conservatism is essentially a creed of lost causes. It is about delaying the inevitable, standing firm against the tide of progressive social change for one more decade or year or day. Vulnerability—a sense of a treasured way of life under siege—is at social conservatisms' heart, and embattled reaction to the slings and arrows of liberal reproach and condescension is intrinsic to conservatism. In contrast, liberalism is generally confident, sure that it is the vanguard of history. But the arrogance of liberals frustrated by the futile intransigence of America's morally conservative majority is fuel for the conservative grief machine. That is to say, overly blatant liberal confidence only delays the hour of liberal victory. From time to time, liberals grasp this. So they tend to prefer Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's relatively subtle (but still annoyingly supercilious) cultural politics of satire over Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's anxious hours of direct, aggressively self-righteous defensive actions in an openly-waged culture war.

W.W. continues to admit reactionary causes are absurd & lost. Yet they must be respected. Why? What will happen if not? There is no useful reaction beyond mocking & sneering. No reasoned discourse will disabuse reactionaries of their self-proclaimed deep faith & other lost causes. Why shouldn't the eminently foolish be sneered at superciliously? While liberals "sneer" (Oh, horrors!) reactionaries literally demonize those w/ less or different religiousness. (Sometimes they just cry "Witch!" Does that fall under literal demonization?) 

And how long would Mr. Wilkinson have us wait for the progress he admits is inevitable to arrive? The aged among us may remember (Youngsters, you could look it up!) as long ago as the 1960s, when certain groups advised what they would call "the coloreds" (If they were in a good mood.) just to be patient, it had only been a few hundred yrs. & they'd get some rights soon enough. Well, it's been all of human history for all of us, & some of us are damned tired of waiting for these clowns to go through their little act & then die off.

However, sometimes a conservative figure comes along who is so outrageously ridiculous that liberals just can't hide their sneering sense of superiority, their cultural politics becomes unusually overt, and conservatives emerge to correctly point out that culture war is waged by liberals too.

Not to get more playground than usual, but who the fuck started this? If perpetual candidate/grifter C.O'D. weren't so anxious to cram her absurdities down the throat of real Americans who don't wear mittens all the live-long day, no one would have heard word one about her, would they? See also: Knee-jerk accusations of "class warfare" whenever it's pointed out that the middle-class (let alone people who work for a living, or who can't work for a living) has been under attack for 30-some yrs. Damned if one resists, damned if one doesn't.

M. Bouffant

[Read this in the first-person plural here. Please.]