Whiskey Fire

Rifle Games for 7-Year-Olds, What a Drag

A woman in Georgia used a revolver to shoot an intruder, much to the delight of the internet's great big fans of the bang-bang-stick. Glenn Reynolds, however, laments that the woman lacked a bang-bang-stick of sufficient heft to satisfy his love of great big bang-bang-sticks.

See, this is where one of those “assault weapons” might have come in handy.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “When some politician starts pontificating that no one needs more than a 10 round clip capacity (or 5, or 3) this is the story that should be shoved in their faces. She fired 6 shots, put 5 in the attacker and he was still kicking. What if there had been multiple attackers. Then that 30 round clip suddenly seems appropriate.”

Well, since she could have purchased one those great big bang-bang-sticks, and didn't, relying on a measly little .38, she was just basically asking for whatever the crowbar-carrying attacker had in mind for her, I suppose.

But why stop at quote-unquote "assault rifles"? After all, as another of Reynolds' inestimable correspondents points out,

I also read on another blog the comments by a western rancher who explained that he always carries a .223 semi-auto rifle when working his own property. Why? Because of wolves. Six charged him one day and it took far more than 10 rounds from his “assault” rifle to drop two of them, after which the other four fled.

What if this woman had not simply faced one intruder with a crowbar, but multiple attackers who were armed with wolves?

Well, her tiny little puny toy bang-bang-stick would have done her about as much good as a tuna-fish sandwich! Stupid "politicians." You can barely hurt anyone with a .38. Even a .40 wouldn't hurt a fly, even at close range, which is why thoughtful gun owners keep lots more weapons lying around the house for emergencies.

Clearly, though, following Reynolds' logic and that of his freedom-loving audience, in a more ideal, paradisical society, this woman would have had the following:

• 14 handguns;
• 43 semi-automatic weapons;
• 9 bazookas;
• Two or three Handy Home Howitzers;
• 15 armed guards on the porch;
• An electrified fence around her property;
• A moat filled with alligators, each equipped with a flamethrower;
• 5 grizzly bears with hand grenades (to repel the wolves).

More responsible "politicians" would subsidize each of these thoroughly necessary items of domestic defense, instead of leaving the suburban-propertied-classes helpless before the wolf-lugging hordes. Likewise, the Airforce needs to be privatized, so that for a nominal annual fee, in a pinch, homeowners can at least call in a drone strike.

Then the Reynoldsian vision for America will at last come to fruition. (Also we will all be immortal robots. The proper sort of "we," anyhow.)

And if anecdotal evidence such as that he cites here proves insufficient to prove his case that all homeowners truly ought to possess firepower of the sort capable of efficiently shooting up elementary schools, the free market provides a solution. People like Reynolds should be permitted to rent out invaders of the variety referenced in the news story above (and I know you know what I mean), so they might finally live out what is obviously their most devoutly-wished personal fantasy.

At a minimum they ought to be able to blow up farm-raised wolves with rocket launchers. I mean, do we or do we not live in a civilized, 21st century nation?

 

 

True Stories of the Right Wing Truth

One is predisposed to admire talking dogs. The capacity for intelligible speech, as most scientific observers agree, is a skill few canines attain.

Hence when one encounters a puppy capable of burping intelligbly the lyrics to "The Star Spangled Banner," one is understandably impressed.

The final line for me to cross in complete alienation from the right was my recognition that Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal—and only because the political spectrum has moved so far to the right that moderate Republicans from the past are now considered hardcore leftists by right-wing standards today. Viewed in historical context, I see Obama as actually being on the center-right.

Woof woof!

However.

Before we all go merrily on together, munching the kibbles (or drawing "final lines"):

The best way to get Republicans to read a book about reaching out for the black vote, I thought, was to detail the Democratic Party’s long history of maltreatment of blacks. After all, the party was based in the South for 100 years after the war, and all of the ugly racism we associate with that region was enacted and enforced by Democratic politicians. I was surprised that such a book didn’t already exist.

This is appallingly stupid.

I thought knowing the Democratic Party’s pre-1964 history of racism, which is indisputable, would give Republicans a story to tell when they went before black groups to solicit votes. I thought it would also make Republicans more sympathetic to the problems of the black community, many of which are historical in their origins. Analyses by economists and sociologists show that historical racism still holds back African-Americans even though it has diminished radically since the 1960s.

Holy shit.

So I wrote Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Unfortunately, it was published the day Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses.

Yeah, well, Obama winning isn't why that book is embarrassing.

It is the assumption that "black groups," and also "people with access to consensus reality," are absolute morons, that is the problem there.

If you don't know why the GOP now wins the South, bless you, have a biscuit.

Some dogs can learn English, apparently. But they'll still eat their own shit.

Can't blame them.

It's their nature.

MAS. Bark bark.

MUCHO MAS. Just to say, while it is all very swell that Bruce Bartlett, David Frum, and Andrew Sullivan have courageously declared themselves non-wingnuts, that hardly qualifies them as people who aren't boring idiots generally. "Finally, after much inner struggle, I realized that the Rush Limbaugh view of the world has its flaws" is not, in the final analysis, a very impressive intellectual manifesto. Here is Sullivan:

I endured the same kind of thing, although I was much less polite than Bruce and had an independent platform. But it's still remarkable to me that I have not been invited on Fox for a decade - even to discuss or debate my book on, er, conservatism and fundamentalism. My book, The Conservative Soul, was not reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, and given a formal excommunication/evisceration by National Review's Jonah Goldberg.

Jesus fucking Christ. Reading these people is like watching the lost footage of Ingmar Bergman's version of The Terror of Tiny Town.

Zombie Turkey Attack

Wingnuts have many cherished Thanksgiving traditions, such as shoving stuffing up their asses, high-fiving themselves for fondly-imagined rhetorical victories over liberals ("Pass the gravy?" "Drop dead, pinko!"), and passing on bullshit tall tales about how the Pilgrims learned a Valuable Lesson about the Evils of Socialism.

Honestly, this is a hoary, hairy, ancient far-right chestnut:

It’s wrong to say that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and labor. As William Bradford recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is plague. After 2 1/2 years, the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic Thanksgiving feast.

They serve up this gibberish every year like it's, I don't know, pasta carbonara or something equally dreadful and hobby-horsical.

The real fun though is with the cretin whom I have just quoted at length attempting to sound smart in his own comments. Get a load of this. This is funny.

Here he is challenged:

Which is not very clear -- but that's not the Fun. Here is the response:

Uh...

Jerry Bowyer doesn't know what the word "tendentiously" means, does he?

Shorter Andrew Klavan

The Long Game

Three areas the Right should address, financially and intellectually

"As the brainwashed American public & the evil Hollywood producers who wash their brains have no interest in any of my art (For I am an artist.) please give me & my fellow conservative artists money, preferably in the form of a tax-free grant or award (For infrastructure!) so we'll be able to reverse liberal influence in the culture & restore the free market by making movies about what swell dudes businessmen are."

     — Mr. Klavan, in the Hudson Institute's City Journal.

As first transcribed here by M.B.

Previously Viewed Movies

The American Jewish vote has long been overwhelmingly Democratic, and that won't stop -- but neither will stuff like this...

Poll shows Jewish support for Obama in Florida down 7 percentage points from 2008

... ever stop getting wanked over by clots like this, who console themselves with happy thoughts about how Orthodox Jews are way into fucking.

Not sure why the right thinks that the American public really wants to see an even more hardcore aggressive Israel that leads the US president by the nose. But then again this is the American right, so we're talking dogma, not sense.

Rape Panels

Much has been written about the Todd Akin "legitimate rape" notagaffe. But as the old saying goes, "nobody has said the most asinine thing ever about any given topic until Dennis Prager bothers us with his horseshit."

Rep. Todd Akin has, unwittingly to be sure, harmed the pro-life movement, his senatorial race in Missouri, the Republican Party, and therefore quite possibly the nation.

"Quite possibly the nation!" How so, one axes?

While he should not have used the term "legitimate rape," he could have explained later that, given the expanded definitions of rape, not all claims of "rape" are truly rape. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Feminist Perspectives on Rape states, for example, that "we must recognize that, in some cases, 'yes' also means no ... The man may threaten to sue for custody of their children, to derail her green card application, to evict her, or simply to sulk and make her life miserable for days should she refuse to have sex. Which (if any) of such nonviolent coercive pressures should be regarded as rape, either morally or legally, is a matter of some controversy."

That would have largely ended the issue.

Indeed. Just who exactly occupies the moral high ground would have then been totally clear, Mr. Already-Kinda-Rapey.

The far greater problem was Congressman Akin's other comment: "From what I understand from doctors, [pregnancy is] really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

As one wit put it about such a comment: that was worse than wrong, it was stupid.

The wit wasn't even wrong: it wasn't Googled.

Akin should say so.

And so should the pro-life movement.

Unless -- and this would be upsetting -- he, and the movement, don't think this comment was stupid.

Pregnancy from rape is rare because a "woman's body shuts down"?

Who told Akin this? And why would he believe it, even if some doctor did tell him this?

Here is my theory.

This is, of course, where The Fun Begins.

I have spent a good part of my life showing what an intellectual bubble the left lives in. That is why so many could believe that boys don't really prefer trains to tea sets or girls dolls to army soldiers. Those who believe such nonsense usually live in an intellectual bubble. They are raised by liberal parents, taught by left-wing teachers from high school through graduate school, watch left-wing MTV and news, listen to liberal NPR, go to movies produced by leftists, etc. Their whole world is left-wing. They don't watch, listen to, study under, or socialize with conservatives.

Bubbles tend to produce nonsense. When the only people you talk to, read, and socialize with agree with you, it is easy to abandon critical thinking.

And when you are morally right -- and those who argue for a right to life of unborn human beings (or human fetuses, if you prefer) are morally and even scientifically right -- a bubble can make critical thought even more difficult.

I wonder if that is not the case with Rep. Akin's comment.

Yeah, maybe.

Also maybe more liberals might want to "study under you" if you were more self-aware and less, well, rapey.

Or, say, if you more clearly "knew things."

Prager then goes on to explain how if he were at a dinner party with Akin he would have totally explained to him exactly how rape works, which might explain why fewer and fewer liberals invite him to dinner parties. ("I would have respectfully asked the congressman whether he was aware of the marauding armies throughout history that raped women. Did he assume that very few of them -- like the German women raped by Soviet soldiers at the end of World War II -- got pregnant? Did he not know how many raped slaves gave birth? Was he not aware of the tragedy of the women of Darfur who, after being raped by Sudanese Arab soldiers, are abandoned by their families for getting pregnant out-of-wedlock? Oooh, pass those yummy canapes.")

Anyhow.

It's more than clear what Prager is up to, and why Establishment Wingnuttia wants Akin dead, his family burned to the ground.

It's because their Moral Clarity is pellucid like donkey dump.

To be blunt: Prager wants to outlaw abortion except in cases of Fair Rape, cases that he would adjudicate with, what, Rape Panels?

"Hello, ma'am. I am here to assess your rape claim. Please give me all the details, so I can correctly adjust the Slutometer."

Right.

Like, gracious, the harm to the nation if it were ever allowed to consider moral questions without heaping sweetening spoonfuls of far-right poopsyrup.

The Newest Civility: "Fuck You. War."

It's Must See Tee Vee, but you can't see it here. (Spent several mins. trying to embed the teaser for "Leaders w/ a Still of Ginni Thomas's Head & Shoulders" here earlier this a.m., but between TypePad & TheDC ...)

Not to pimp, but Blogger did embed it chez moi, & the good parts (0:34 & 2:40, if TheDC earns your click) are cued. The best part: Supreme Spouse Ginni Thomas has presented, under her name, techno thriller (guessing) author Brad Thor reciting Breitbart's anti-"hard institutional left" mantra, "Fuck you. War," in unison w/ the Ghost/a recording of/Zombie Andrew Breitbart. Un-bleeped, no NSFW. Free speech, moonbats!

(Of actual interest beyond the schadenfreude is the question of what we'll call the living digital dead who already walk among us, & can only increase. Bets on a Tupac-style Breitbart hologram screaming "Behave yourself! Stop raping people!" making an appearance at next yr.'s CPAC?)

Back to the absurd, where TheDC disclaims:

Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser.

Just giving it away, then?

— M. Bouffant

here's the vid -- Thers

The Kraphammer of the Gods and the Dolchstoss

Warning: link is to the Daily Cruller, and it's not just Kraphammer, but also the Doughy Pantload explaining why polls of veterans show a preference for Rmoney.

"At the same time, it seems to me that if you were a traditional military voter, you might have some serious problems with Obama. The way he sometimes talks about the military, he talks about the troops — it can often seem narcissistic, political, and rub people the wrong way."

- the Doughy Pantload

"And we heard Obama today doing essentially doing penance for a country that spat on soldiers who returned from the Vietnam War."

- The Kraphammer of the Gods

Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth

By Kevin Baker (Harper's, June 2006)

Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.

Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.

...

It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces.

And there you go.

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

~

They Never Make a Scene By Hanging All Over Me In a Crowd

by Ripley

In an effort to boost US keyboard and monitor industry sales, I offer this (via Southern Beale at First Draft):

Behind the locked doors of the chamber that was surrounded by more than one dozen police, Rush Limbaugh watched as his bust for the Capitol’s Hall of Famous Missourians was unveiled on Monday, May 14.

Shortly after the unveiling, however, Gov. Jay Nixon’s administration issued a document raising questions about the House speaker’s authority to handpick whose bust can be placed in the Capitol rotunda.

The unveiling of Limbaugh’s bust was kept secret from all but invited guests until less than an hour before the ceremony.

While Republican lawmakers were invited, Democrats were not and visitors were blocked from entering. All but one of the doors to the House chamber were locked with armed Highway Patrol and Capitol Police patrolling the hallways outside the chamber.

Cowards and crybabies, daddy-o! It's the 21st Century Republican party at their finest.

 

Rip -

 

Marco Rubio, Bapto-Catholic, Condemns Catholic Church In Cuba

Sweet Blood of Jesus, is there anything actual for which sad Senatorial sack Marco Rubio might denounce the Roman Catholic Church? Anything at all?

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said Wednesday that he is “deeply concerned” that the leadership of the Catholic Church has “negotiated themselves a space of operation” in Cuba “in exchange for looking the other way,” and expressed concern that Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming trip to the island may “reinforce that arrangement.”

Rubio, a Catholic, said during a discussion at The Heritage Foundation that the Catholic Church has “negotiated a political space for themselves in exchange for their moral imperative.”

Volunteering an example, Rubio said, “last week… the church invited — the cardinal invited — Castro thugs to come into the church and remove people.”

Rubio also denounced the church for “actively participating in exiling dissidents,” sarcastically adding, “somehow exiling someone to Spain is a humanitarian measure.” (SEE ALSO: Marco Rubio was a Mormon once)

During the event, Rubio discussed Cuban oil exploration and expressed concern that the Communist government may in the future find a new source of revenue in oil exports. He said that a greater concern, however, is the potentially devastating effect of a Cuban oil spill on his state’s environment.

Will not be arsed to see what Sen. Rubio's position on BP oil spills might be, but why would one expect him to be any less hypocritical? Speaking of, from the Wiki:

Rubio attends Catholic Mass as well as a Southern Baptist church in West Kendall, Florida.^[34][9][35].

Apparently some of us can have it both ways.

— M. Bouffant (Also at Tedium Central, w/ video of Rubio babbling which, between TypePad's pickiness & TheDC's cheesy embed code, won't display here.)