Whiskey Fire

Chuck Norris's Mom Kinda Sounds Like a Frickin' Dumbass

Not much from our new favorite TownHaller this week, though this is piquant:

The only reason Obama is strolling through the Rose Garden, golfing with Tiger Woods and cracking jokes about Jay-Z is because the media is not holding him accountable.

If only the gosh-darned Em-ess-Em would do its job, Obama would be out there putting with Rory McIlroy* and name-dropping Madison Rising.

Hehdizzle indeed. Or hehdizzle. Or "shoot me."

When Veruca Salt's dad needs to hire a ghostwriter for his kid's private diary, here's his gal.

Nevertheless.

Let us instead cast asparagus upon Chuck Norris's most recent emanation, wherein he gives up trying to hawk the ghastly books he pretended to write, and instead attempts to persuade his demented, mush-gummed fanbase to waste their government checks on an anti-government book he forced his mother to pretend to write.

So, hello, Chuck Norris, pictured below.

You're looking fine!

What now with the your mother having Advice for America now?

"Back in the 1930s, any work was good work. We picked cotton, picked up cans, scrap metal, whatever it took to get by. The message from yesteryear is: Don't be too proud to do whatever it takes to meet the financial needs of your family.

"There's no shame in a hard day's work, whatever it may be. It seems today that people would go on unemployment before they would work in a field picking anything. That would not have been the case when I was growing up."

Clearly, your boy is following your Noble Example. In the 2000s, any work was good work. He picked up sentences, paragraphs, sometimes whole columns, whatever it took to make like he was "writing original material". The message from thisteryear is: don't be too proud to cash any damn check you can as long as it's scribbled by suckers.

Also too, clearly, our current Role Models are undocumented Mexican immigrants, who will work any damn job for any money, and who rarely apply for unemployment. Just like George Washington!

"We didn't have much. In fact, we had nothing at all, compared with people today, but we had one another. We were poor, but rich in love. We've lost the value of family and friends today, and we've got to gain it back if we're ever to get back on track. If we lose all our stuff and still have one another and our health, what have we lost? We don't really own anything anyway. Everything is ultimately on loan to us. The Bible says, 'The earth is the Lord and all it contains.'

Damn straight. Poor people nowadays are too materialistic.

Also dig the bit about how maybe, just maybe, Roosevelt had a better record than did Jesus in helping folks out during the Great Depression. And that communal action along the principles of An Injury to One Is an Injury to All ("We thought and worked in community. The way we saw it was: If one of us was chained, none of us was free") is All-American and Godly.

But this is the Fun Part:

"There was nothing easy during the Great Depression, but we endured and made it through, and we learned even more how to simplify, help one another and depend upon God. Children took on chores at an early age and by early teens were assisting in some ways with the provisions of the home. Yesteryears' kids often bore today's adult responsibilities. Back then, we grew up fast and often married young. In fact, by the time I was sixteen years old, five of the seven Scarberry children in our family were married, including me."

Child labor, child marriage, don't ever imagine a democratically elected government could ever represent your immediate interests or redress your material grievances...?

What a glorious time in American history! Everyone was poor and desperate and we had Jim Crow!

Happy sigh!

Fucking hell.

I'm sure in person Chuck Norris's mom is quite lovely, but this is the public arena, and hence, one must ask, is anyone actually paying for this horseshit?

Forget it, NewsMax and TownHall exist, so yeah, obviously.

Shit.

MAS. Whoops, forgot to follow up on the asterisk (*) up there next to the name "Rory McIlroy."

Just meant to point out that the douchiest web-site ever is the Official Rory McIlroy Homepage.

It's douchetastic. Did you know... he's an athlete?

Civility Trolling: How It's Done

"Civility" = censorship, has long been this blog's major thesis.

For example.

A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each other. That’s dangerous. Civil society depends on a minimum threshold of tolerance and mutual respect. Fall too far below it, and the seething paralysis* you see in Washington could soon be the least of your concerns. This is America’s biggest political problem -- and Krugman’s not part of the solution.

People not being nice to each other is not America's "biggest political problem"; America's "biggest political problem" would be intractable high unemployment.

If the "biggest political problem" we faced today were an excess of shrillness, well, the obvious Way Forward is for the New York Times to fire Krugman. Then in a month everyone gets a job!

This is a colossally stupid commonplace:

Meanwhile, for the side that thinks it has the better arguments, naked contempt for dissenters is plain bad tactics. That isn’t how you change people’s minds. Better to fire up the base with a little demagoguery (such as calling conservatives racist, as Krugman is wont to do) than reach out to the uncommitted? I don’t think so. The enthusiasm you inspire on your side is canceled out by an equal and opposite reaction on the other. Krugman stirs up the right in much the same way that Rush Limbaugh, for instance, inflames the left. Granted, if you’re going to have a spokesman, better a Nobel laureate than a talk-radio clown. The fact remains that Krugman’s weary disdain for roughly half the country is self-defeating.

Please. Krugman is not talking on behalf of what Crook calls "half the country." Neither is Limbaugh.

The fight here is over who controls Elite Discourse.

The KILL THE DEFICIT nonsense was hardly a consensus arrived at after a period of Learned Colloquy after the 2008 collapse.

Calling for Polite Debate is easy and lazy; controlling the terms of Polite Debate is where the fighting happens.

That Paul Krugman has even caused minute fractures in the Elite Consensus is remarkable.

To the extent that "civility" protects a highly politicized status quo, it is censorship, and ought be pissed on, as there is anyhow nothing else you can do with it.

Because CENSORSHIP = UNEMPLOYMENT BEING CONSIDERED LESS IMPORTANT THAN THE DEFECIT AMONG ELITE YAPPERS.

A state of affairs which HAS OBVIOUS POLICY CONSEQUENCES.

(Good Lord... did I use... all caps?

AIEEEEE!

Well, fuck me then.)

* Can "paralysis," in point of fact, "seethe"? Fuck no!

We Today Mourn the Loss of a Great Woman

She lived long, and brought nothing but good to an admiring, nay, loving nation. She displayed a rare bravery, yet never lost her innate dignity and humanity.

Today, she passed.

Today, we weep.

But as we look back, we celebrate... a legend.

RIP.

Annette Funicello, we will miss you.

In other news, though, that sour old shitbat Thatcher just croaked, so I guess it all kind of balances out.

As to said shitbat, I'll mostly leave that to Charlie.

A fun parlor game would be to identify Thatcher's most lastingly noxious legacy. I myself am pulling for the We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists posturing, especially as regards her disastrous play-acting in Northern Ireland, for the reasons Charlie mentions. But I'd stress that even as a matter of realpolitik her Ulster "policies" just didn't work, except insofar as they gave stiffies to armchair Rambos & Rambettes of the waxy sort currently jerking off to Nekkid Iron Lady porn over at the Klller Klown Korner.

Kevin Cullen is much nicer than I am on this point, but it's rather inarguable. Fans of grim historical ironies will relish this Thatcherism -- 

the more reasonable ones of the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in the future government

-- and bear in mind the career of Martin McGuinness, whom one need not especially like in order to note that the IRA at their worst was never in the same league as the fucking Khmer Rouge.

Reagan and Thatcher bequeathed to Western Civilization this Moral Clarity through Violence bullshit; they didn't invent it, but their version of it sure does continue to produce corpses.

WE WILL WIN THROUGH SUPERIOR AND DEVASTATING MORALFORCE.

It was always bonkers and bloody.

Fuck.

 

The Short Joust

The a lot of reasons why there's not much talk in Serious Circles anymore about the hideous disaster that was, and is, the Iraqi Adventure. But one such reason that deserves attention is that the only way Serious People ever discuss any fucking thing ever nowadays is in terms of bullshit competitions of at most a week's duration -- and where yesterday is garbage.

Here look. Duncan is totally right that Richard Cohen is very good at what he does, even when you can look back and want to throw up upon contemplating what he did.

But the key here is not simply what Cohen did or said; sure he was a dick. But he was hardly alone in this madness. The point is to identify the reasons why this madness took hold so powerfully among the class to which Cohen belonged.

And you can't forget that while to the vast majority of the inhabitants of this planet the clever turns of phrase of people like Cohen are utterly meaningless, in the intimate world of the Village Cohen likely dined out for years on "fools and Frenchmen."

These people compete very intensely against each other. The New York Times and WaPo opinion pages are not meant to inform anyone of anything. They are lists in which morons don elaborate heraldry to engage in fancypants shitheaded jousts.

In such competitions the prizes are awarded, say, weekly. Being proved right ten years later? Who the fuck cares about ten years later?

I agree with everything Scott says here. I remember the dsquared post referenced vividly; I remember reading the original and thinking "I knew that from Irish history, and also from trying to get contractors to give honest quotes on the roof, that the Iraq war was stupid."

The insight here is not that "fibbers lies are useless," but that "people who want to 'win the week' need to shut the fuck up about policy."

They won't. But what's poignant is that these contests aren't even over money.

They are over the weird Rules of Who Rules Pundit Mountain.

Oh! Integrity!

Via LGM, I observe that one of our oldest and dearest friends came into an odd bit of pocket change a few years ago.

A range of mainstream American publications printed paid propaganda for the government of Malaysia, much of it focused on the campaign against a pro-democracy figure there.

The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.

Could this possibly be the very same Joshua Trevino whom we here at Whiskey Fire, and elsewhere, have long known as the Living Embodiment of Online Integrity? Why yes!

Ahh... those were indeed merry times. I'd forgotten the fun we had at that last link. Some of it was of course juvenile -- though I'm not so mature yet as not to laff at the "Tacitus" link on the "Blogintegrity" blogroll, and I pray I never am.

But this is not about nostalgia for bygone hi-jinks. Something I said back then, is something I'll say now:

This gets to precisely my issue with Tac. Full as he is of himself and full as his rhetoric is of high-minded platitudes, what he really wants to do is to is, well, what he wants to do. He sees a public statement of principles as a definition of a kind of a boundary: "aha, this tells me how far I can go, and hence anything I do up until that point is fair play!" Now, me, I see a statement of principles as an aspiration and a guide for behavior, and not as grounds for endless, twisty, knotty ethical negotiation and compromise. The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth -- sign a pact with Tac, that's what you get.

You have to be pretty fucking twisty to get paid nearly $400K from the fucking government of fucking Malaysia.

First of all, the fucking government of fucking Malaysia!

Really? Who takes that money? Ever? Who does that?

I'm sorry; it appears that, on the Internet, I have quite personally been given hectoring, self-righteous shit by someone who has accepted several hundred thousand dollars to make the despotic government of Malaysia seem not so bad in the United States.

Incidentally -- Josh?

One investor has complied a list of reasons why Malaysia is an attractive travel and investment destination. He prefers a hands-on approach, and came up with this list while on a personal walking tour of Malaysia --

Slurp slurp. What the fuck is wrong with you?

And what precisely do you imagine has ever disappeared from the Web?

Oh, I got a lotta these:

Randomly (MAS)

Malaysian royalty has already stepped in to ensure that MPs retain a proper decorum while the parliament is in session...

(The things some people think they've flushed... omigod.)

Scary Magnets Pounce upon Command

Perhaps you are puzzled, even troubled, by the issue of Race in America.

Well, here is fucking Victor David Hanson to explain, shut it, you, RACE IN AMERICA IS FINE. IT IS FINE. THERE IS NO TROUBLE WITH RACE IN AMERICA.

Headline/subhed:

The Tangled Web of Race

The racial binaries of the civil-rights era no longer apply in America.

Gosh. What a relief. At long last, Lord, at long last, The National Review has discovered that America has finally entered a post-civil rights era.

Yeah.

Anyway, to the substance, such as it is. Take it away, VDH!

A number of commentators have openly sympathized with multi-murderer Christopher Dorner, who shot seven innocent people, killing four of them. Apparently the late Dorner was a voice in the wilderness crying out against the racist injustice of the “system.”

Well, I see, but... wait, what?

A number of commentators have openly sympathized with multi-murderer Christopher Dorner --

WHAT! Who? What? How?

His brief killing career, in the reprehensible words of Fox News commentator Marc Lamont Hill, was “exciting” for many people – almost like “watching Django Unchained in real life.”

Shriek!

That movie’s star, Jamie Foxx, had joked of his stint as a Quentin Tarantino big-screen hero gunman, “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”

All right, let's pause.

The "number of commentators" who have said that what Christopher Dorner has done in shooting people is cool & swell is one person talking at Fox News (!), and then this by association includes Jamie Foxx speaking fondly of having gratifying fantasies of shooting slaveowners.

So what the fuck is Hanson's point?

In print, and on radio and television, we are presented with bizarre themes like “Understanding Chris Dorner,” and comparisons with “Superman” in Dorner’s effect upon his admirers. Dorner, a leftist doppelgänger of Timothy McVeigh, did not just go on the attack against his hated southern-California law-enforcement community, but he also wrote a rambling, narcissistic, and self-serving diatribe that the Left gleefully elevated with the Marxian sobriquet “manifesto.” But in truth, the scribbling was no more than a pathetic rant that mentioned everything except why a police board, an internal appeals board, and the courts all independently found him culpable of lying as charged, and thus upheld his firing for baselessly smearing a female superior.

Well, OK. Dorner was nuts. The "crazy shooting people" thing established that to my satisfaction.

But Hanson kind of does not remotely establish that The Left is all about Dorner:

Nonetheless, some on the left have done their best to make the cowardly (is not coolly gunning down an unarmed woman and her fiancé the work of a coward?) Dorner into a modern Nat Turner. But that is a stretch --

Oh fuck you. "Some on the right" fuck tadpoles.

Hanson, you are making shit up.

Why?

Who cares? But it is interesting to note that while Dorner is an obviously out-of-control loon, the Los Angeles Police Department could not help themeselves in going bugshit out of control themselves.

I mean Holy Crap.

I will now speak for the Entire Left.

Nobody I know defends Dorner. But we do note that his case proves that even when they are dealing with a psycho, the LAPD can't help but act like like psychos themselves.

And there is nothing worse than a psycho with a badge.

The LAPD, when confronted with Dorner, behaved like Dorner.

They shot innocent people!

Which leads us, balefully, to the rest of Victor David Hanson's ideas:

The other great racial cause célèbre of the past year was, of course, the Trayvon Martin case.

I'm too bored to get into the weeds here, so let's get to the bone: if, in the Martin case, the police had not rushed to the exoneration of the alive person and glossed over the issue of who shot the dead person, this would not have become a national explosion.

As we have seen with Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill, race is becoming a construct frequently used by elites for purposes other than their concern for the general welfare.

Oh fuck you.

So, according to the National Review, freedom consists of ignoring bigotry when it comes to the police, and then of squalling about wicked minorities in made-up controversies, as regards the Warren nonsense.

Booga!

When You Add Up the Numbers

"Professional Blogger" John Hawkins is, most charitably put, something that exists on the Internet. His stuff may not be original, but to be fair, it is also tedious. Also he looks like a malignant potato.

So, uh, here is something emanated by John Hawkins, which I present to you because I love you all so very sincerely.

Many liberals have come to believe the rules of morality, decency, and good behavior don't apply to them. You see, since they're liberal they think that no matter how racist, sexist, violent, dehumanizing, evil or disgusting their behavior may be, they're still good people just by virtue of the fact that they're liberals.

Gosh.

Just as a member of the KKK would fear being cast out of the group for speaking out against doing evil to black Americans or a Crip would have similar fears about defending a Blood, liberals are not allowed to call for human decency in dealing with those who stand in their way.

Every word here is a Golden Sermon. If you are opposed to, say, voter ID laws, you are in all essentials A Grand High Dragon Poobah of the KKK, and also you likely are a fully paid-up member of the Crips, at least according to their elaborate bylaws.

On "Gobshite"

So, Erick the Son of Erick is no longer doing whatever the hell he was doing at CNN, beyond being stupid there for money.

This from E+E is winsome.

For three years I have received unmitigated hate and loathing from the left and, ironically, from a lot of folks on the right.

I don't hate Erick Erickson. I love Erick Erickson! That Erick Erickson is a major figure on the American right is awesome! He's an obvious goddamn unlikeable horrible twerpy idiot! MORE ERICK ERICKSON! MORE ERICK ERICKSON!

That CNN hired him in the first place was surely a disgrace -- to CNN.

But let us talk about swear words. Our friend Charles Pierce shouts to us out:

 First of all, I'm absolutely certain that the redoubtable Thers, my fellow Ringsend cowboy, who runs the Whiskey Fire shebeen along the docks of Blogistan, has played the gobshite card as much as I have. As for the observation by my old Zuccotti Park buddy sub-Left'enant Blimp there, I do not dismiss all who "dissent" as gobshites. Here at the blog, the term is strictly reserved for the people on the Sunday showz. Other people with whom I disagree are omadhauns, gossoons and, occasionally, thooleramawns. I hope that clears things up.

"Gobshite" is a wonderful word. It does not, I think, translate precisely into American. But the full connotations of the intended meaning are nevertheless quite clear, nationality aside. Get called a "gobshite" and you know what you've been called. It's lingua fuckyoua.

(This blog has long pioneered the term "fucknose," in the Interests of Science. I say this for posterity.)

But then let us recircle to The Small Fry of The Same Name, Erickson -- bearing in mind this from the stuff C Pierce quotes:

The most recent, from August 2012, was a quote from an apparently right-wing "political observer" named Charlie Cooke. He was discussing, you guessed it, Charlie Pierce: "Pierce's hyperbole transcends mere disagreement, as does his dismissal of all those who dissent as ‘gobshites.'"

Oh right.

What these gobshites like Cooke, or Erickson -- or Lord save us, Goldberg -- really hate is being called names like "gobshite," even though all they do is talk ridiculous bullshit.

What they want is Backdoor Legitimacy -- the right to talk perfect crap because they are Conservative Tribunes, and as such, Sensible. Deserving of being taken seriously... just BECAUSE. FAIRNESS. CIVILITY.

A clever ploy, it worked for a while. And it still works. Lots of dead Iraqis and unemployed Americans are grateful everyone had a nice polite conversation on an unwatched Sunday morning teevee show.

Fucknoses.

Burning Flag Birthday Suit

I've never much hidden my overall dislike of the US constitution.

As a general rule, large groups of upper class Englishmen are incapable of producing anything except a bunch of crap you can never clean up properly, and the Founding Fathers were nothing if not upper class Englishmen, and hence, hateful twerps.

That an allegedly free people cannot stop unironically using puerile, self-abasing terms like "the Founding Fathers" speaks to our to our perdurable national mania for tongue-bathing obvious moral degenerates as long as they have some type of "patriotic" pedigree. That an allegedly free people cannot put a stake through the rotten heart of such vampiric malignancies as the Electoral College, the Senate, and (shudder) New Jersey speaks to the undeniably ossifying effect of our continued braindead, onanistic adoration of a shoddy, slapdash, cloddishly compromise document written by a gang of wig-wearing, fractious, syphilitic, slaveowning dickheads.

So much is clear, uncontroversial, and refreshingly devoid of hyperbole.

Hence I found this op-ed in the NYT more than a little surprising, yet quite welcome.

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Shit yes!

To quibble, "evil" is useless as an analytical criterion, so I'd pinch-hit "undemocratic" for "downright evil." But the rest is unexceptionable.

Not kidding here, either. There is an intense censorship effect in Our Free Society against the idea that it is at all fair game to, of all things, think critically about the US constitution. This to me is the most interesting part of Seidman's piece:

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is.

Bold mine.

You're just not supposed to think of the constitution as something certain people thought of and put into practice in specific historical circumstances. Even though that is all that it is. It is not Holy Writ, and to think of it as such is one of the following: childish, wicked, or dickish.

Childish.

I like liberty and the Constitution is its bulwark.

Wicked.

And if the Constitution is this obsolete and “evil,” then maybe secession isn’t off the table after all? . . . .

Dickish.

I big strong go boom-boom. (Paraphrasing)

Because democracy demands that if you wonder why Wyoming has the exact same Senate representation as a state where people live voluntarily, you've just peed on Jefferson's grave.

I would cheerfully pee on Jefferson's grave. And on Wyoming.

MAS. PowerTools provides the definitive case for why you can't entrust the defense of a stupid church to its halfwit clergy.

But the Founders built well, knowing that the Constitution—the documentary embodiment of the Rule of Law replacing the Rule of Man (or Rule of the King, as practical matters had it in the 1780s)—would work only if it became an object of reverence in place of a monarch among the people.

As a matter of history, this is fanciful garbage. As a matter of exemplifying modern "conservatism" as nothing more, or less, than dickless, vaginaless, mindless, conformist idolatry... well done, PowerLine!

I mean...

Hence most constitutional law professors treat the Constitution as a plaything from which to extract whatever outcome they want.

Because, you'll never catch out a "conservative" jurist ever doing anything of the sort.

These fuckers, they snort what they sell, and then they tell you, like butter wouldn't melt, that their powdery nostrils and red-rimmed crazy eyes simply prove that they so very dearly love the Jelly Doughnuts of Freedom.

 

 

The Point!

Here is the entire extent of the wingnut grasp on Civility:

"Here are thoroughly random individuals on the Other Side saying Bad Things. This scores us many Civility Points. Hence, we are right about the Estate Tax, excuse us, Death Tax."

Nuts.