Whiskey Fire

To Read the Orange Signs

AN OPEN MEMO

FROM: Thers, On Behalf of All Us liberal Bloggers Who Live on Snark

TO: Michael Gerson

Dear Mr. Gerson:

In reference to your latest post, especially lines like the following:

Recent books and studies seem to indicate disturbing sexual trends among evangelical Christians. And this time we're not talking about their pastors or political leaders. The new attention is on evangelical teenagers, who reportedly start sex earlier than their mainline Protestant peers.

One gleeful headline on an Internet site recently read: "Evangelical Girls Are Easy." That is not the way I remember it.

It is you, sir, yourself, who make it too easy.

Love (and a Moste Chaste Kiss),

Thers.

(More seriously, Gerson argues that according to the "sniggering" MSM, Evangelical Christian Teens seem to fuck at least as often as all other teens; he concedes that this is true, but he stresses also that if you only count the small percentage of the wealthier ones who are totally zealous Evangelicals, then their Abstinence Batting Average improves greatly. Also, he says if our society were totally different then different things would exist in our society. He's fucking brilliant, that man. Why, I think he is almost bright enough to write for Townhall.

Also, dig this:

Conservatism teaches that individuals are not inherently good and so must be carefully civilized.

Yes, I know.

I thank Gerson for providing an elegant nutshell explanation of exactly why I am a liberal in the first place.)

A Cocoon of Skintight Buffoonery

UPDATE: Welcome Jules Crittenden fans! Try not too drool so much!

***************

Following up on the posts below about the Right Blogosphere's claim to Superiority over the Left Blogosphere, on the grounds that Conservatives Don't Say "Fuck."

On Memorandum right now, there are two top stories.

The Right Blogosphere is obsessed with this story  (Gavin provides the short version here). This story of course lacks any political significance. Nevertheless, the Right is in quite the tizzy over it, up to and including this kind of thing -- whipping themselves up into a Righteous Jihad that will include everything from making every last possible scrap of information about the writer public, to barely disguised hopes that the writer will be "punished" by the other members of his unit.

But they don't say "fuck!"

On the other hand, Left bloggers are interested in the subpoena issued to Karl Rove as well as possible perjury charges against Alberto Gonzalez.  You know, trivial  stuff like that!

But some of them are probably saying "fuck."

So, clearly, it's obvious who is Serious and who is merely filled with Hate.

Yep.

Someone Tell Me Why

C'mon, someone tell me this is a put-on. C'mon.

Nutroot's Profanity Exceeds Right Wing Profanity--- 18 to 1!    

With the latest accusations by Bill O'Reilly on the the profanity at the premier democratic blog Daily Kos and the latest excuses by Daily Kos apologists who defend their God-given right to post profanity and hate speech...

I thought it was time to dust off the infamous "7 Words Study" comparing language on the right side of the blogosohere with the language frequently used on the left side of the blogosphere.

** You may visit the The NewsBuckit at any time to get the complete results from this intensive look at nutroot's profanity.

This is what happened when the students at News Buckit compared nutroots profanity with profanity on the right.

And this is what I found, using what I deemed -- through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists -- to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. (Not counting this one. :)) I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference.

So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.

Of course, this does not take into consideration the extensive amount of anti-military, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic or anti-American postings on the Left.

Teh Awesom!!I111.

So, seriously. It's a joke, right? Guys?  Uh, guys? You're parodying, right? Guys? Anyone? Ha ha very funny.

It's a joke, right?

A Senator's Suitcase

In answer to the question asked in the title of Josh Marshall's recent post: "Impeachment?"

Why, yes!

Beyond that, whatever the merits of the arguments for or against impeaching George W. Bush, there is more than ample justification for the impeachment of Alberto Gonzalez. There should not even be a debate about this. Perjury, prosecution... yes.

But also, Gonzalez must be impeached. Now.

Some absolute minimum of accountability must be exacted. Why are we even still talking about this? Impeach Gonzalez.

Cast into the Naked Audience

If it's Wednesday, some silly conservative-type person with a blog is complaining about Liberal Incivility and Bad Language. Of course this occurs on other days of the week as well. But it's Wednesday, so here's Don Surber:

A DNC apologist last night accused Bill O’Reilly of cherry-picking foul-language comments and hateful comments left at the Daily Kos web site. The DNC guy may have had a better case if Kos himself could make a point without resorting to profanity.

An auspicious beginning. Who said what about the what to the who now? Surber later on will preen about his "30 years as a writer" -- a long and no doubt illustrious career in which he apparently learned how not to include checkable references so as to make his smarmy innuendo more effective. How delightfully slimy of you, Mister Surber!  A "DNC apologist" of no name said something last night in some unidentified forum. Eeek. And now Harry Reid has to "apologize" if someone  in comments to an obscure Kos diary calls some creep like Surber a "fuckberry"? Right.

Also entertaining here is the conflation of "bad language" with "hateful comments," which are not quite the same thing. A good old-fashioned idiomatic American English "fuck you" may indeed be a proper, principled, no-nonsense response to, say, weaselly political rhetoric. "Hateful comments" are a totally separate category -- racist language, for instance, would be hateful... but not every racist says "fuck." Surber doesn't make this distinction, because he's lazy or it would just be inconvenient to do so. This is the ancient dilemma with our friends over there -- are they lying or merely stupid?      

Lefties have a tendency to drop F-bombs. And not just in comments. Over at the Huffington Post, a search of the F-word hit the jackpot....

People have the God-given right to write what they wish. But I caution liberals on their language. People judge maturity in part by vocabulary. I have learned this in 30 years of writing. I pass it along....

I suggest that Kos, et al, start monitoring their comments. You want to sit at the grown-ups’s table, you have to act grown-up.

"Righties" have a tendency to pretend that they are "mature" and reasonable and that they make sense just because they don't say "fuck." Or don't say it so often. Or something. What's amazing is that they say this with a straight face, because when it comes to the quality of their actual "ideas," they are usually talking the most astounding absolute shit.

"People" make judgments not merely upon vocabulary. Sometimes they make judgments based upon actual issues and whatnot, and also upon the real-world results of someone's rhetoric. Ah, how I miss 2005, when pretty much daily some wingnut dope would opine that "the American people" would never vote in Democrats because some liberal blogger somewhere called Bush a shithead or similar. As it turns out, however, Bush is a shithead, and the GOP lost the House and Senate. So much for the Wingnut Electoral Civility Thesis.

So go ahead, assholes. Deplore the Liberal "F-Bombs"! I myself think the less than happy effects of the  literal bombs that have been deployed as a consequence of your rhetoric over the past several years are more than sufficient testament to your "maturity" and right to sit at the "grown-ups' table."

Surber's post is vile. There's nothing much in the whine about the bad language, but he's going to throw in everything he can to make it seem like there is. Not only does he conflate curses with "hate speech," he then conflates curses with "obscene or libelous comment," a completely  separate category of speech.  All this in the context of this inane argument:

The blogger is responsible for what is on the blog. A blogger who leaves an obscene or libelous comment up should be held accountable for that comment. You own it. It’s yours.

Of course, liberals never accept personal responsibility. Lawyer Glenn Greenwald wrote at Salon: “One of the lowest and most dishonest tactics is to attempt to smear and demonize a blog by exploiting statements left on the blog by commenters which have no connection to the arguments made by the blogger.”

No. Wrong. What is low is allowing people to post such things as “comments.” Greenwald, who was something of a sock puppet master back when he was on Blogger.com, knows better.

What an ass. What blogs need is... litigation! Lawsuits! (If this isn't what he meant about "accountability" he should say so, as that's the clear implication of "libelous".)

And then the "liberals never accept personal responsibility," and the resurrection of the Greenwald "sock puppet" stuff, which is (a) bullshit, and (b) wholly irrelevant in this context...

You have shown me your language, and my profit on't, is I know why to curse.

The New Party Begins

How is this video not the Greatest Thing Ever?

Talk So Fast She Stopped Me

This is all my balls.

Honestly. What a stupid column.

A Statistical Occurence

Roy posts about something I meant to post about but then forgot. Rasmussen has a new poll that is causing happy underpants in Wingnutland. The poll has the headline:

Associated Press, MSNBC and CNBC Seen as Having Liberal Bias

"Seen by whom, pray," is the issue. This is absurd. Look at what the Rasmussen says:

The current survey finds that 30% of American adults believe the Associated Press has a liberal bias and only 12% believe it leans the other way. Local television news is viewed as having a liberal bias by 30% and a conservative bias by 17%. MSNBC is seen as being a bit more to the left — 33% say it has a liberal bias and 13% say the opposite. For CNBC, 29% say it has a liberal bias and 14% say a conservative bias.

So about a third of American "adults" believe the AP is "liberal." Phht. About a third of Americans will believe any sort of ridiculous shit if there is a concerted effort to make them believe it. And anyway, 30%... why is that number significant... hmmm....

Oh, yeah.

Even more striking than the changes in some core political and social values is the dramatic shift in party identification that has occurred during the past five years. In 2002, the country was equally divided along partisan lines: 43% identified with the Republican Party or leaned to the GOP, while an identical proportion said they were Democrats. Today, half of the public (50%) either identifies as a Democrat or says they lean to the Democratic Party, compared with 35% who align with the GOP.

Which is not dispositive on the issue of whether or not most Americans see The Media as having a Liberal Bias, but really needs to be borne in mind. 30-35 is the Wingnut Base.

And believing in the Perfidy of the MSM is one of the cornerstones of Wingnut Identity. Hell, you don't get to be a wingnut without it. Bourdieu calls this allodoxia: a structural misperception. To be a Movement Conservative means believing or at least claiming to believe that the Media wants to elect a Democrat for everything from Preznit to Dog Catcher. It is doxa: an article of faith. It is incorrect, sure... the MSM is not run by Harry Reid. The "MSM" is a very difficult and untrustworthy pancake, but it surely is not a mechanism of the Democratic Party. Unless that's your dogma. Which is the real point: belonging.

So let's pry further into Rasmussen's numbers, or at least as far as we can go without paying for the fucking crosstabs, which I won't. Fuck that shit. But we can get better numbers if we go back to the ancient days of July 13:

Not surprisingly, there are huge partisan and ideological differences in the data. For example, among self-identified liberals, all of the media outlets are believed to have some net bias in favor of conservatives. However, 50% of liberals say that NPR is unbiased. Forty-three percent (43%) say the same about CNN. As for the major television networks, 49% of liberals believe they have a conservative bias. Just 10% of liberals see a liberal bias at ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Conservatives throughout the nation see things entirely differently. Sixty-two percent (62%) see a liberal bias at the major broadcast networks and 55% say the same about CNN. Forty-five percent (45%) of conservatives see Fox as unbiased and the rest are evenly divided. Eighteen percent (18%) of conservatives see Fox News as having a liberal bias while 21% say the opposite....

On a partisan basis, Democrats see the major television networks and Fox as biased in favor of conservatives. Solid pluralities of Democrats believe CNN and NPR deliver news without bias. Those Democrats who see bias at CNN and NPR are fairly evenly divided, but are a bit more likely to detect conservative bias.

Republicans see a strong liberal bias on all the outlets except Fox. Forty-nine percent (49%) of the GOP faithful see Fox as fair and balanced.

Right.

Here is the fucking rub. Anywhere between a quarter to thirty-five percent of Americans will always say that the Media has a Partisan Bias. They have been relentlessly drilled to say this or about forty years now. This is what it means to be a Conservative: to believe silly shit about the media. Which is not to defend the media, which is, frankly, retarded. But it is not actively promoting Democratic candidates. To say the fucking least.

So, good for Rasmussen. That last release is a total load of shit.

Feh.

The Colorful Summer

Shorter my advice to the very prestigious Noel Sheppard:

Better deal with the bullshit in your own eye than try to remove the "fuck" from mine, asshole.

Golden Needles in Their Eyes

I admit that I had been skeptical of the idea that the Harry Potter books are, at heart, Conservative. But then I read the last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I am forced to admit that I was wrong. Despite persuasive arguments to the contrary, the book really does hew closely to Conservative Values.

Take this passage from near the end of the book, for instance. Yeah, this is all spoilers, but so what? Western Civilization is at stake, and young Harry's story has Important Lessons for us all. Let's listen in.

"So," said Harry incredulously, "we've been mispronouncing and misspelling the name all along? It's... it's... really Vold al-Mourt? And all we have to do to defeat him is get on the Internet and write interminable blithering bullshit about the Muhammadan Menace and hysterically link to each other at least four dozen times a day whenever one of us notices a typo in an AP story that it turns out really isn't a typo at all? And we should cheer for stupid wars against this threat, ill-conceived wars run by arrogant idiots, moronic wars that will only make everything ten times worse? And we should also start frothily gibbering about how cool torture is?" 

"Yes!" said Dumbledore happily -- Dumbledore, who was dead as a mackerel but who could still show up at the climax to provide exposition because of some freaky Wizard shit.  "Exactly! Vold al-Mort has been in charge of the Media for decades! He wants you all to become Muslims and have high birthrates so as to stamp out Democracy. He got the idea from an old Mark Steyn column. Swarthy bastard. But now you finally know the Answer, Harry! You know the terrible mistake he has made!"

And Harry did know. With a sense of glorious triumph, he opened The Laptop of Gryffindor and typed the spell that he knew would end the Death-and-Falafel Eater Islamomagic Menace forever...

"Cheneyus Totalis!"

And as the spell radiated out from his blog and was linked favorably by some git from Tennessee who liked to pretend he was a Mighty Robot, Harry noticed with satisfaction that a side effect of the spell was that it also meant gays wouldn't ever be able to marry. Plus it proved that Al Gore was fat.

Pretty convincing stuff. Can't believe I ever had a moment's doubt.