Whiskey Fire

Blood-Boiling Assholes Of The Day

Especially the fucking creep at (4:00): "Capitalism requires winners & losers, & we get uncomfortable w/ the losers." Virtually everything recited by these clowns is boilerplate bullshit ("Created" wealth, my ass!) but Oklahoma City mayor & lazy loser gov't. employee Mick Cornett should be thrown on the lazy loser pile & made to experience just a bit of "losing" until he dies in pain in a gutter. This reporter would be more than comfortable w/ that.

Pelley: Big corporations in this country at this moment are sitting on a trillion dollars in cash, that they could invest in jobs and plant and equipment. But they're not doing it.

Mick Cornett: There's no customers. I mean, you're not going to expand your inventory if you can't sell the product. And you're not going to hire people if you can't get people to employ those services.

It is a conundrum how this could be solved, isn't it?

Pelley: Mick, your city has the lowest unemployment rate of any major city in America.

Cornett: That's correct.

Pelley: How do you create jobs in this country? In the rest of the country?

Cornett: Well, from a long-term perspective, I think the comments about education are right on. But from a shorter-term perspective nationally, we've got to understand that government has gotten too big. We take on the welfare of all mankind as a practical objective. And it's just not. Capitalism requires winners and losers. And we get uncomfortable with the losers.

Talk about a non-answer to the question. Mayor Mick's defense of class warfare reduces workers to disposable, replaceable units who can go fuck themselves because, after all, they're the required "losers." Fuck him & the voters of OKC sideways. W/ a splintery broomstick.

— M. "Blood Boiling" Bouffant

D'Souza Revsionism, Already

Are you ready for some revising? Even rightists can't dance around facts forever; one of them just noticed (besides everything the Pres. typed in his book that D'Souza couldn't be bothered to quote, because it would refute his Unified Bullshit Theory of Mystical Anti-Colonialist Influence) that President Obama really hadn't been around his Luo tribesman father during his formative yrs., so a more plausible malign influence should be found, & surprise, surprise, the demon's been right there all along!

I'm not going to dissect D'Souza's argument. [Oh, we knew that! D.D.'s argument is so fragile we doubt if he'd breathe on it. — M.B.] But I would like to add some important information: If Obama is indeed motivated by anti-colonialism, the source may be Frank Marshall Davis as much as, if not more than, Obama's father.

You know where this is going if you're the sort who's amused enough by these people to be reading this, so I won't bother myself w/ Googling Frank Marshall Davis for you. And if Jeremiah Wright & the Weather Underground are more familiar to you than Davis is, it's only because he didn't leave us w/ as many documented outrages ("God Damn America!!") as the other Obama-molders. Typist Kengor, however, dug deep into the Communist files, because, more surprises, he's pimping* a new book himself.

I come to this via a different route from D'Souza. My new book -- released the same day as D'Souza's, coincidentally -- examined the communist movement in the 20th century, and specifically how communists duped progressives and liberals. I determined, definitively, that Frank Marshall Davis was not a duped liberal but a duping communist. I show this at length, quoting Davis's weekly columns from the CPUSA organ, the Honolulu Record, and reprinting pages from Congressional investigations and from Davis's declassified FBI file, including a document that lists his Communist Party number: 47544.

And Kengor rests his case. Talk about having a guy's number! Heh indeedy!

Oddly enough, there is classical leftist revisionism in Kengor's McCarthyite (No, reactionaries, that is not a compliment. It's an insult, if insulting if still permitted.) screed. It's quickly dismissed as evil anti-Americanism, natch, but Frank Marshall Davis raises an interesting point or two about colonialism.

Consider a May 19, 1949 column, "How Our Democracy Looks To Oppressed Peoples," where Davis excoriated the Marshall Plan. Yes, the Marshall Plan.

"For a nation that calls itself the champion of democracy, our stupendous stupidity is equaled only by our mountainous ego," Davis complained. "Our actions at home and abroad are making American democracy synonymous with oppression." He added: "I have watched with growing shame for my America as our leaders have used our golden riches to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world."

Davis characterized the Marshall Plan as a "device" to maintain "white imperialism." This nefarious "oppression of non-white peoples everywhere" was purchased via Secretary of State George Marshall's "billions of U.S. dollars … to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions of humans."

In another column a few weeks later, on August 18, Davis stepped up the communist attack on "the double-talking Truman administration with its program for World War III." "The Truman doctrine in Greece and Turkey and then the Marshall Plan," were, claimed Davis, "based upon the continuation of colonial slavery by the ruling classes of Western Europe."

In his next column, Davis protested: "I shall not help England and France keep millions of my colored brothers in Africa and Asia in colonial slavery. Yet that is what our dividend diplomats ask of you and me when they demand our support of the bi-partisan Marshall plan."

I can't disagree w/ that. And the horror doesn't stop. Brace yourselves (My emphasis. COMMIES!):

Yet, there's a more sinister element, as suggested by a July 1935 document held in Comintern Archives in Moscow. That document ordered American comrades (like Davis, who, at that point, lived in Chicago), to go to Hawaii to agitate against Hawaii becoming part of the United States. The Soviets wanted the territory as a base of operations. What would be the party line? The document ordered American communists to claim there was a "growing discontent of the masses of the population in the Hawaiian Islands," resulting from "the regime of colonial oppression and the exploitation of American imperialism with its policy of militarisation of the Hawaiian Islands."

So in 1935 Hawai'i was not a Territory of these United Snakes, but a division of the Dole Corporation? Next we'll be told that until statehood was granted, the islands were just floating out there, unanchored, & menaced by sharks & giant octopi.

That was precisely Davis's position when he relocated to Hawaii, whether by orders, by personal beliefs, or both. And it isn't unreasonable to expect he might have shared such thinking with a bright teenager named Barack Obama. Bear in mind, Obama admitted to learning from Davis, including college advice -- his very next step. Obama describes his first days at college as hanging out with "Marxist professors," attending "socialist conferences," and "discuss[ing] neocolonialism."

Rather than heralding the American exceptionalism that sought freedom for the people of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Davis would have passed to Obama a very different narrative about America's place in the world, beginning with its alleged imperial-colonial sins.

This was the wrong side of history, but it was the side of Frank Marshall Davis. The remaining question is to what extent this affected Obama, then and still today.

Should those whose idea of history is to stand athwart it yelling "Commie!" at the top of their lungs ever be taken seriously when they decide which side of history is "right?" I think not.

But that is quite a question Mr. History poses. 30-plus yrs. ago some guy maybe repeated to Obama something he'd typed 20-plus yrs. before that? Since nobody, nowhere knows nothin', no how, 'bout Obama, except what they think he's thinking, based on any wild delusion (but seldom on anything he's actually said & done) there's just no way that remaining question could be answered, is there?

At least not until the President's Executive Order on Hawai'i is issued. Then we'll know whether he's handing it over to the Hawai'ians, selling it back to Dole, or just turning it into Airstrip One & running all the drone attacks in Pakistan & Afghanistan from Pearl Harbor.

*Referred to a man as pimping something! Can I expect an avalanche of mens rights weasels complaining?

M. Bouffant (A whore just like the rest.)

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.

Now We Know What She's Been Trying To Do All These Yrs.: Stop Sympathetic Suicide Stories

La Althouse (Don't! All necessary info.):

4. The man's Facebook page shows that he regarded his interests as "being mean" and "making fun of people." Does that make you less likely to scold me for being mean and making fun of him? I am making fun of him, but I deny that I'm being mean. This post is part of my ongoing effort to deter people from committing suicide. I believe stories about suicide are full of the kind of sympathy that creates a romantic aura around suicide. I want to give suicide the kind of awful image that will make [it] less easy to embrace than facing up to your problems in the material world.

Stop creating those auras, lamestream media. Face up to your problems, people, & your problems are solved!

2. A construction worker who witnessed the fall has opined that the man survived not because he landed on a red 2008 Dodge Charger, but because the car contained a set of rosary beads. 

3. He landed feet first, "twisted like a pretzel," in the backseat of the car. The car seat! That, not God, accounts for the soft landing ...

One must admire someone who can deny God's rosary but has such faith in tough love & facing up to one's problems (Is this different than "facing down to" one's problems, whatever the hell that might be?) as immediate cure-alls. Is Dr. Laura's syndicator in the market for a replacement scold?

M. Bouffant

Congratuations!

Sincere and hearty congratulations to Victor David Hanson for the most unutterably fucking stupid anti-Obama blog post maybe ever, or at least in the last few minutes, or until the next time Jonah Goldberg feels especially flatulent. (Checking watch -- some trains never come late!)

Anyhow, Mr V. D. Hanson doesn't like how Obama uses pronouns, as they indicate Socialism. Yes, it's that special.

Anyhow, you fish, down there in the barrel? Say hello to my leetle fren.

My fellow Americans: I've spoken to you from this historic office on many occasions and about many things. The power of the Presidency is often thought to reside within this Oval Office. Yet it doesn't rest here; it rests in you, the American people, and in your trust. Your trust is what gives a president his powers of leadership and his personal strength, and it's what I want to talk to you about this evening.

For the past three months, I've been silent on the revelations about Iran. And you must have been thinking: "Well, why doesn't he tell us what's happening? Why doesn't he just speak to us as he has in the past when we've faced troubles or tragedies?" Others of you, I guess, were thinking: "What's he doing hiding out in the White House?" Well, the reason I haven't spoken to you before now is this: You deserve the truth. And as frustrating as the waiting has been, I felt it was improper to come to you with sketchy reports, or possibly even erroneous statements, which would then have to be corrected, creating even more doubt and confusion. There's been enough of that. I've paid a price for my silence in terms of your trust and confidence. But I've had to wait, as you have, for the complete story. That's why I appointed Ambassador David Abshire as my Special Counselor to help get out the thousands of documents to the various investigations. And I appointed a Special Review Board, the Tower Board, which took on the chore of pulling the truth together for me and getting to the bottom of things. It has now issued its findings.

Don't like that? Like to quibble with it? Well, all-righty then! (Going here, throwing dart totally randomly.) Okay, here we go:

Message on the Observance of National Nursing Home Week, May 12 - 18, 1985

May 13, 1985

During National Nursing Home Week, I urge all Americans to remember the contributions our older citizens have made in building America. These men and women are an important link with traditional American values for our young people today. Continued contact between older and younger Americans helps to strengthen these values for our future. I support the goals of the nursing home industry to provide the highest standards of medical and social services for the elderly, but institutional care is not enough. We must also encourage everyone to include the elderly in their lives.

Sweet Jesus Fuck! What a trivial announcement, and he uses the first person subject pronoun! In English!

My irritation at this bullshit goes beyond its obvious triviality. If Hanson thought this thesis about how Obama uses a particular pronoun was at all worth thinking about, and how this is somehow connected with "socialism," and I cannot imagine why, he could have gone at least to the fucking Google and see if Obama does this any more than any other modern presidents. I say "no, Obama doesn't." If he wants to say otherwise, well, he could check to see if his fucking thesis is correct before opening up his fucking yap.

Yeah, it's just a stupid blog post. But then again, I'm given to understand that Hanson is some class of "scholar." And yet he's content to throw poo because his biases tell him to. What a fucking embarrassment.

Alternatively, He Could Tie A Kitten to His Head and Demand to Be Called "Susan the Great"

***POST NOW CONTAINS THRILLING UPDATE!***

Mitt Romney for Health and Human Services chief! Marc Ambinder says that Obama could do worse.

No, he fucking couldn't. In the first place, Romney's an idiot. In the next place, he has his head up his ass. Additionally, he's either a reactionary slime about women's rights to their own bodies, or else he's lying about it, which isn't much better. Moreover, Hugh Hewitt likes him, and Hugh Hewitt is an ass. FInally, what the fuck? Mitt fucking Romney?

A lot of shit seems to be bobbing up out of the Atlantic lately. Must have been some sort of spill...

MORE. Via Brendan, Karen Tumulty also decides to leap out of the box. Tumulty's post ends with this truly chilling sentence:

Jonathan Cohn steps even further out of the box.

Shudder! Certain things are very frightening when they emerge "out of the boxes" in which they had been  interred, such as, for example, corpses hideously reanimated through the application of strange, ghastly magicks. Cohn proposes Arnold Schwarzenegger for the HHS post, so this concept applies.  

In regards to the phrase "think outside the box," I have long considered our culture's profound shallowness to be epitomized by the fact that  we have a cliche for the idea that we should not think in cliches.

In this vein it is symptomatic of how ridiculous our political discourse is that our insider punditry is always preening themselves on how Bold and Daring they are when they propose that the Democrats should Embrace Bipartisanship, when this sort of "contrarianism" is merely the dogma of their class.

Here's some out of the box thinking! How about we all acknowledge that the new president has a fucking mandate to enact universal health care, and the punditry start talking about why our political culture is so thoroughly corrupted that the democraically expressed will of the people to get this done will likely be frustrated? 

If the chattering classes can't do this, they need to get back in the fucking box and the box needs to be nailed shut. Air-holes are optional.

BELOW: A pundit "thinks outside the box."

I Am a Scientist (UPDATED: OMIGOD THIS IS 2 FUNNY)

Science! Wingnut science! Global climate change, disproved yet again! All the top wingnut scientists know this, because of this article in... Pravda. (Do I shit you? No. I shit you not.)

Anyhow, Pravda says that we're soon in for an Ice Age, not global warming. An Ice Age! Gracious! Best grab a scarf! Brrrrr!

Top wingnut scientist and noted fucknosed prissy shitbooger Noel Sheppard speculates, scientifically, based on scientific information from the Glenn Beck show, that Vladimir Putin knew all about this scientific Pravda science revelation, and is using it to cleverly manipulate the world oil market. This is not only possible, but probable. Because once something is published in Pravda, it automatically attains what is called by disinterested scientists Automatic Unquestioned Scientific Legitimacy.

This is well known. For instance, here are some other Very Important Scientific Stories broken recently by Pravda:

SCIENCE ITEM! France unveils secret images of aliens and their spaceships!

SCIENCE ITEM! Dog gives birth to mutant creature that looks like a human being!

SCIENCE ITEM! Celebration of underwear fashion!

SCIENCE ITEM! Meet Russian Supermodel Natalia Vodianova!

SCIENCE ITEM! Hellish hairy sea monster cast ashore!

Take that, Al Gore! And if you want any more, talk to the free animated clip-art gnomes and leprechauns!

BONUS TOTALLY FRICKIN' HILARIOUS UPDATE. The author of this piece in Pravda is named Gregory F. Fegel. Do you know what else Mr.Fegel believes? That THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WAS BEHIND 9/11. Go, Wingnuts, GO! GO!

Smear It Around

by Molly Ivors

True: since I spent 12 years in Catholic school, I am acquainted and Facebook-connected to some O'Reilly-esque souls who represent my sole connection to Greater Wingnuttia (as I do not generally have the intestinal fortitude to go spelunking withe Thers). One fellow tells me in his news feed that the WSJ yesterday published an expose of, well, pretty commonly known information about Barack Obama and WIlliam Ayers.

Huh. You'd think they'd be distrracted from all that this week, wouldn't you? Or that if they were going digging in history they'd look for a more pointed comparison to the present moment, like, say, the Keating 5 scandal?

Guess not. Things must be swimming along so well that they can afford to obsess over who served on what local committees with whom, and where the meetings and bake sales were being held.

Looks like they don't need that bailout after all. Whew!

Oblivious So Far

The very clever Jake Tapper conclusively proves that just because John McCain is obviously and disgustingly willing to sell out his alleged principles to please bigots like Rush Limbaugh as soon as it becomes politically expedient to do so, that's no reason why Obama should be so crass to say so in public.

Tapper, you see, is a professional.

UPDATE. Ay. IT NEVER ENDS. Senores y Senoras, John McCain, candidate of Expertise on Foreign Policy.

Unreal...

This is good news for John McCain in Florida.

We Fill Us in

Interesting (or not). Over on Memeorandum the only links to blogs complaining about the SiteMeter "New Coke" upgrade go to wingnut blogs.

I said the new Sitemeter sucked, down there somewhere. But it does seem to be about right that Greater Wingnuttia wanted to Speak Truth to SiteMeter a lot more insistently than, say, I did.

Why is a mystery, but I'd speculate that it has something to do with wingnuts taking this blogging crap a lot more seriously than I would ever care to. Also, online "conservatives" are just generally whiny, precisely the sort of horrible assholes who bitch the screechiest when it comes to shit that they get for free.*

*(Let me go out on a limb here and say that if you pay for SiteMeter, there exists an excellent chance that you are a narcissistic dink. This may not necessarily be true, but as a matter of empirical observation, the point stands.)