Whiskey Fire

You Saw the Balloons

Oh, I am disappointed. Here I was, getting all excited about this headline:

Thompson Taps Harris for Spokesman Role

And preparing for some world-class snark about the cage match between Jeri Thompson and Katherine Harris. Alas, no. (But that use of the word "taps" suggests some wiseass writing the headlines, as in "I'd tap that.")

Todd "Not Katherine" Harris is late of McCain and the Governator and Jeb (though local Florida gossip said Katherine was, too, at least of the last of these). It does seem as though Fred is losing staffers faster than Larry Craig is losing Republican friends, however. The difference is that Thompson (who, Chris Matthews assures me, smells like Aqua Velva and Metamucil and Cialis) seems to be able to buy new friends, and keep them at least long enough to introduce them to his lovely wife, Livia.

I found this link over at The Corner, where they're all atwitter about farm subsidies and Craig and Ana Marie Cox, the anti-KLo. Funny, though, there's not a word about this, and in fact precious little about Iraq at all. I guess it's just not that fun anymore.

--Molly Ivors

Always to the Same Place

Easy Target Blogging continues: we return to Townhall, where the circus of stupid never quite stops. Today we look at Michael Reagan. When we're done with that, we rush forward and gang tackle Michael Reagan, tickling him mercilessly and shouting 'coochie-coo!" as he shrieks like a 9-year-old girl.

Listening to Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig proclaim in near-thundering terms that he is not gay and never has been gay, I couldn't help but recall hearing Bill Clinton swear he "did not have sex with that woman."

This would be more interesting were I not convinced that Michael Reagan can't help but recall the "I did not have sex with that  woman" line whenever he butters his toast, wipes his ass, or loses his car keys. But I will give Michael Reagan credit for offering an interesting inadvertent rebuttal to one of the more fashionable theories floating about the left blogosphere lately, that conservatives tend to downplay straight sex scandals but go nuts about gay sex scandals. This is true, in terms of comparing Craig to prostitute-visiting diaper fetishist David Vitter. But it must never be forgotten that to the Wingnut Mind, no matter how many Pampers you have graced with your sperm, no matter how many times you've scattered your seed with a gentleman friend over the Porcelain Maelstrom, those transgressions are as nothing when compared to the horror that has been wrought by Bill Clinton's Very Heterosexual Penis.

So, important reminder. Onwards.

Because Larry Craig is a staunch conservative from a staunchly conservative state, Democrats and their leftist allies are dancing in the streets over his embarrassment, busily reminding every sympathetic reporter who will listen to them that the Idaho Senator not only espouses family values, but has been a staunch foe of gay marriage.

Ergo, he's not only a closet men's room lothario, but a hypocrite as well. It's a case of "don't do as I do, do as I say."

Well, yeah. I'm not dancing in the streets, exactly, but it is pretty funny.

As tempting a target as Craig may be, however, it's interesting how gingerly the overwhelmingly pro-gay media have approached the subject of his alleged homosexuality.

There's an overwhelmingly pro-gay media? 

Except for the more-militant gay activists, at least one of which has charged in unprintable language that Craig isn't really gay, he just likes to have gay sex, most of the media have avoided any hint that in reporting on the scandal they find Craig's suspected homosexuality objectionable.

Hmm. I think it's pretty clear that the obscene militant gay activist he has in mind is his Townhall colleague Kevin McCollough, who told us that "The fact that he has maintained a marriage for as long as he has demonstrates that he has chosen heterosexual behavior for most of his life." Potty-mouth.

Anyway, homosexuality is unobjectionable, unless you're a bigot, and I for one have never been one to buy the argument that tolerance needs to extend to bigots.

Michael Reagan's column goes on from there, but it's not very smart, I warn you.

In the media's eyes, however, there is a lot wrong with a closet gay criticizing gay marriage or promoting family values which they see as code for condemning homosexuality and gays.

Democrats and the media define Craig as a hypocrite. By their twisted logic, therefore, anybody who espouses traditional Judeo/Christian values must also be a hypocrite.

Michael Reagan has performed a double-reverse triple-axel somersault ice flip thingy! Hooray! What he seems to be saying is that he is terribly disappointed that hypocrisy is indeed hypocritical.

To clarify:

(1) People who go around passing anti-gay legislation while being gay themselves are hypocrites.

(2) People who support such legislation by invoking ludicrously incoherent "Judeo-Christian values" are bigots.

It's not that hard. Glad I could set that straight for you. (That is a very funny joke.)

And of course, the electrifying conclusion:

Democrats want the public to believe that Craig is a hypocrite who speaks one way and acts in another – appearing to be a practicing heterosexual when he is in reality a closet gay – not, they'll hasten to say, that there's anything wrong with that.

Logically and rhetorically speaking, I think he just swallowed his own ass.

What he means is, he wants it to be OK for him to deny equal civil rights to homosexuals, and is pissed off that the Craig case, whatever else it is, exposes uncomfortable confusions in the "pro-family anti-gay" position. Which is to say, he's a grumpy bigot. Poor lamb.

Just a Friend

I want Biz Markie to be in charge of everything. I want Biz Markie to be Pope.

Let the Competition Begin

I won't even link to it, it's that bad, but last year I made one of the more embarrassing, ludicrous-in-retrospect predictions in regards to college football one will ever encounter. Oh well. A new season is upon us.
 

Ah, my Miami Hurricanes. Who knows what the future will bring? I think Randy Shannon is a class act, and obviously knows how to run a defense: the Hurricanes often get sniffed at for running simplistic defensive schemes, but these schemes still work, more often than not. Miami has had some amazing defenses the last few years. Tough, fast, and most of all, well-coached. The 'Canes drubbing of Virginia Tech at home two years ago was pretty satisfying, and that was all to do with a highly disciplined defense. Shannon's win, therefore. A defense does not need to be fancy: it needs to be cohesive and athletic. Especially at the college level. The  'Canes  will have one of the nation's top D's.

It's the offense that must be questioned. And there is nothing a Hurricanes fan enjoys more than wondering if the offense will be anything more than competent.

Ah, fucknoodles. We beat Marshall on Saturday by 21 or I feel grim. I will also miss much of the game because I will be assistant coaching for the 7-year-old's soccer team. These are indeed tough noogies.

The 7-Year-Old's soccer team though, is surprisingly good -- shockingly so, since I'm one of the coaches, and the amount of not-knowing-shit about soccer I possess is astonishing.  For the sake of perspective, the 7-Year-Old has played 2 previous soccer seasons, and in those times never came within 10 goals of winning a game. I'm not actually joking about that statistic. Now he's 2 and 0, and mostly kinda confused. It had literally never occurred to him that it might be possible to win when soccer was the issue. He'd gotten used to the idea that the whole point of the sport was getting pounded and then having a juice box and some snacks. I'm glad things have turned around, or else he might have grown up to be the next Donna Brazile.

Of course, what you need to know about anything to be a reasonable coach for 8-Year-Olds in any sport is pretty basic. Remember You're on a Team; Pay Attention; The Bathroom Is Over There;  Shut Up; Stop Touching That; Nobody Is Interested; Your Hand Does Not Belong There; You Are Not a Puppy; and so on.

Anyway, I think the 'Canes this year don't win the ACC, but make it much more respectable than it was last year.

Into the Void and Over the Goalposts

I told you I'll be sticking with the easy ones for a bit. So... even yet still more Kevin McCullough! In my defense, this shit is pretty funny.

Senator Larry Craig is either incoherent or incompetent – or both. His press conference on Tuesday afternoon was exactly the wrong thing to do - on nearly every level. And I for one do not believe that most of his story holds.

Save this one item, when he stated clearly, "I am not gay!"

....

If he meant that was "not homosexual" that too is also likely.

So, McCullough informs us that Craig is neither gay nor homosexual, though he apparently does believe that Craig really was looking for male-on-male sex in an airport bathroom.

I remind you that McCullough is paid to write stuff like this.

Homosexuality is not a state of defined being. Rather on the best science man has gathered we understand it to be a series of emotions, feelings, desires, choices, and most importantly behavior.

Well, there you go. "Homosexuality is not a state of defined being," a category that McCullough doesn't himself define. What he seems to be trying to say is that while Clark probably likes fooling around with strange guys in bathrooms, he isn't actually "gay," because there is no gay. This is an insight on the level of Keanu Reeves' realization that there is no spoon. As, however, a practical matter, such philosophical maundering can get one into trouble, as when you try to eat soup with a fork, or else when you try to explain that you didn't actually have a dick in your mouth at all -- why, that was quite clearly a popsicle! Or perhaps a spoon.

After that, the column gets kinda stupid.

The fact that he has maintained a marriage for as long as he has demonstrates that he has chosen heterosexual behavior for most of his life.

No, it means he has chosen to fake heterosexual behavior for much of his life, while publicly deploring homosexuals.

There's a great deal more silliness, but get a load of the electrifying conclusion.

I was asked on CNN if I felt this would rip the GOP apart. I said something similar to what I said concerning Mark Foley, "sexual deviants can't hurt the principles of the GOP."

Conservatives, particularly faith-based conservatives, expect the GOP to sheriff out the miscreants among its ranks. Liberals have no moral standards thus making it nearly impossible for a liberal to ever be accused of being a hypocrite. That also explains why they celebrate an adulterous President, push the most radical of sexual agendas upon the masses, and mock the aberrations of the other side.

Conservatives do have standards, expectations, and accountability.

That's insane.

This maniac was on CNN?

Something in This Deal for Everyone

It's long been clear that you can never be too cynical about the Bush administration. Whatever bottom you think they've hit, they always dig deeper.

That's why it's so tough to figure who Bush is going to nominate to replace Gonzalez. On the one hand, the presumption is that he will behave as he always has and name a complete wingnut bastard. But then again, some are theorizing, as does pseudonymous in nc in Yglesias's comments, that Bush's most pressing need is for someone, anyone, to stall congressional subpoenas and the like, and so he'll get someone "reasonable" in as soon as possible. Both theories are plausible because they're both pretty cynical.

My bet is that Bush will try to have it both ways. He will nominate a true-believer nutjob and then accuse the media and the Democratic House & Senate of rank partisanship of the sort that makes Broder squawk even before they raise a polite objection. Either he'll get his way and have his stooge in quickly, or there will be a long drawn-out fight that will eat up more of the clock before the end of his term.

The Democratic leadership will need to do a hell of a lot better fielding this one than they did FISA. My optimism, of course, is unbounded. Of course.    

The Finest Joke Is upon Us

I've been pretty busy lately. Hellishly so. Thus, nothing but soft, easy targets for now -- like Townhall columnist, conservative talk radio host, and complete drooling nutjob Kevin McCullough.

McCullough exceeds even his usual high standards with this essay called "Why Liberals Always Protect Perverts." Mmmmmm, yummy... sweet, sweet lunacy.

When liberals are given the choice between acting decently or choosing the riches of perversion - liberals prefer perversion. And if protecting the honor, privacy, and even nakedness of vulnerable women and children is juxtaposed to say the slightest possibility that someone's right to practice perversion might be curbed - liberals will come running to the aid of the pervert. In fact liberals will go so far to protect perversion that they will actually enlist the use of potential victims to make the case, consequences to the unsuspecting females be damned!

How lucid.

Indeed, can anyone in good conscience deny that liberals are constantly juxtaposing curbs? I bet you, you liberal swine, juxtapose several curbs a day. And when you're done with that, you loll around in the riches of perversion, blatantly not protecting even the nakedness of women. (Perhaps, shockingly, you even are a woman, a possibility that McCullough has apparently not considered.) At any rate, you are clearly so degenerate that you are constantly shouting "consequences to the unsuspecting females be damned!" At, like, the grocery store. In the produce aisle, I should imagine. Sicko.

Anyway, what I think he means is, libs come running for the great taste of pervs.

Liberals at their core have no sense of true north. They can't determine right from wrong, good from evil, and in this case even help from hurt. Worse yet - they don't care. The hardness of their hearts towards the victim is not only apparent in their actions, but the mockery of their words adds insult to injury.

Do you realize he got paid to write this? It's not even good wingnut drivel. It can be had for free from any number of imbecile conservative bloggers who can at least manage to explain what specific ridiculous thing they're babbling about before they get into the familiar boilerplate ranting. Here, you have to wait a few more paragraphs, including a sideswipe at every liberal's greatest hero ever, Geraldo Rivera, before McCullough finally gets around to explaining what specific bug just crawled up his ass and puked. It all has something to do with the New York City Council. No, really.   

If you have ever dreamed of taking that fabulous shopping trip to New York City, you'd be advised to stay away. Because right now, this very minute, today...there is no law protecting the women you cherish in the dressing rooms of New York City boutiques, shops, department stores or even their hotel showers or bathrooms.

See if the owner of the hotel, the proprietor of the lingerie boutique, or the manager of any of the major shopping hot spots in Manhattan decided he wanted to drill a hole that allowed prurient viewing of your wife, fiancé, mother, sister, daughter or niece - in a space they would otherwise have reasonable expectations of privacy in - then he could do it, just for kicks, and there is no legal recourse you can take in response.

As long as there is no camera involved they can spy on your lovely's lovelies and you can't say "boo" about it.

It's the ban on boo-saying that I find really obnoxious. Why should the law prohibit me or anyone else from uttering particular monosyllables? The outrage.

The genital ownership issues here are pretty amusing -- creepy as hell, sure, but amusing. GO TO THAT BIG APPLE HELLHOLE, AND THOSE BASTARDS WILL TAKE PICTURES OF YOUR WIFE'S VAGINA. Or your niece's. Don't you even care about your niece's vagina? Because that's your vagina -- in the sense that you own it. And those swarthy big city shysters are stealing it from you! Go get it back! Hurry! Go, scoot, fetch that vagina! Good boy. Also, chicks dig shopping. Heh. Chicks.

Women read Internet opinion pieces too, y'know, Mr. McCullough. Granted, not yours so much, if they have anything better to do and they're not morons. But still, I believe my general point stands.

And he still hasn't explained just what exactly the hell he's gesticulating about. Wait... here we go:

Peter Vallone Jr. had been receiving complaints in his Queens district office for a number of weeks about a pervert who had been ordering a bagel and coffee every morning and then parking himself directly under the train platform vent for the N-line subway. This particular perve had a thing for looking up women's skirts and he found it amusing to calmly eat his breakfast while stretching his neck to peep. Vallone's own staffers even complained as the place the man like to do his viewing from was literally steps from the councilman's front door.

Vallone began to research the matter and discovered that the man was breaking no known law in New York. Incredulous at this dismaying fact the councilman drafted a resolution that would punish such behavior.

Oho, so that's it. See here, and here, and here.

Peter Vallone, hero of a Townhall column? Hmmm. Anyway, McCullough is pretty certain that the reason people oppose the law is that they're greedy Liberal degenerates. But let's then look straight at the proposed law -- as McCullough himself cites it:

The bill would make it illegal to look at a person’s “sexual or other intimate parts, in other than a casual or cursory manner, for the purpose of entertainment, sexual arousal or gratification, or for the purpose of degrading or abusing the person being viewed."

The bill has, um, problems. It leaves to the discretion of a New York City police officer certain decisions as to what is and is not prosecutable for which they may not be trained or even remotely competent or trustworthy. I have gotten drunk with New York City police officers. And while they have many fine qualities, I do not necessarily trust them to always make the most public-spirited determinations as to the finer points of the law when it comes to the ethics of looking up women's skirts. I say this with some asperity. Perhaps you've noticed.   

Voyeurism, in the manner of the story that inspired Vallone's law -- the guy at the subway ogling women on the stairs over his head -- is offensive because it is sexist. Forgive me if that doesn't seem to me to constitute the substance of McCullough's chief objection to this behavior: rather, he quite clearly regards it as a form of property theft -- he's in yr sbwy stealn yr coochies. As it were.

Liberals will profit mightily by giving aid to perverts, pandering to peeping toms, and giving sanctuary to 31 count indictees of child rape/executioners. They will do this as opposed to protecting the privacy of their own girlfriend, fiancé, wife, mother, or daughters. And when necessary they will even brainwash women to make the case for them.

So which is more "creepy" - banning the perverts or defending them?

Have we really arrived at the day in which we have to ask such questions?

Oh for fuck's sake. Honestly. Now they're writing their own punchlines. But even that's not so weird as this, and I am not making this up. This is the picture accompanying this McCullough article:

And here is the caption:

Women compete in a high-heel sprint in Moscow July 28, 2007. About 100 women took part in the race wearing high-heeled shoes with a required minimum height of 9 centimetres (3.5 inches) to compete for a shopping voucher worth 100,000 roubles (about $4,000). REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin (RUSSIA)

How do they do it? How are they so consistently crazy? The mind wobbles.

Also, anyone capable of the straight-faced use of the phrase "your lovely's lovelies" should be shot. I can imagine no persuasive objection to this determination.

Little Man Bleeding

by Molly Ivors

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Thank fucking christ, they've found someone to blame!

Republican John Warner, one of the Senate's most respected voices on military affairs, fleshed out his surprise view expressed last week that Bush should undertake a limited troop withdrawal from Iraq by Christmas.

US soldiers "have performed magnificently ... but the government under the leadership of Maliki and other Iraqi leaders have failed to put the other part of that partnership in place," he told NBC television.

Democratic Senator Jack Reed echoed Warner in arguing that the Maliki government had failed on key political benchmarks such as an oil revenues law and reconciliation between Iraq's warring sects.

"I think we have a right to be critical of a government that is not doing what a government must do -- protect its own people, make difficult decisions that in the long run will provide for the safety and security of the Iraqi people," Reed said on Fox News Sunday.

Aside from the clearly psychotic behavior of any Democrat appearing on Fox News Sunday, American politicians bloviating about what they do and don't have a "right" to be "critical" of vis-a-vis the Iraqi clusterfuck is laughable.

I have no doubt that al-Maliki could have performed better. And yet, somehow I really doubt that he, like Hitler or Stalin or even George W. Bush, is alone responsible for the mess his nation is in. Yet why should he have achieved anything at all? For years, we and he have been assured that more soldiers and contractors, more clapping, more digging, was the answer. It was ours to win or lose; Iraqi politics were a second- or third-level consideration, if that. This turn-on-a-dime race to place the whole thing at his feet reeks of an American propaganda exercise designed to absolve us from any responsibility for the escalating civil war.

After all, it's almost September, and we know what that means! We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen!

As it happens, I do believe that a political rather than a military solution is the sole hope for some sort of balanced peace, and obviously the political structure is not in place to achieve that. But whose fault is that? The purple-finger people? The people who voted in what they thought were their best interests? Or the crowds of twelve-year-old bureaucrats who treated Iraq as their own personal sampo, determined to remake it as some freakish cross between Gilead, Colorado Springs, and the Marianas Islands?

All I'm saying is that if I were al-Maliki, I'd wonder what the fuck was expected of me.

Next, they lock al-Maliki in a box with a wire mother.

A Wasted Plan

Apparently Berkeley Breathed has been censored. For this. On the strip's site we read:

Note to Opus readers: The Opus strips for August 26 and September 2 have been withheld from publication by a large number of client newspapers across the country, including Opus' host paper The Washington Post. The strips may be viewed in a large format on their respective dates at Salon.com.

I of course disapprove of the censorship (assuming that's what it is), though it should also be said that the strip as it now exists sucks and isn't funny or even very intelligent. Vintage Bloom County was, in fact, funny, but you know, that was a long time ago. And even the classic Bloom County strips never really got much past a sort of hit-or-miss conventional-wisdom cranky libertarianism, as far as political thinking goes. Ultimately the strip never stood for anything besides being amusingly grouchy, and that only works for blogs, in the long run. But what the hell, anyone who bought the strip should run it. It's not like it means anything, you know.

Saw this for some reason at milblogs, which bills itself as "free speech from those who help make it possible." I'm all for members of the military engaging in free speech, but as I've argued before, the American military does not now play any constructive role whatsoever in protecting the free speech rights of American citizens. The notion that they do so is a silly and indeed pernicious rhetorical commonplace. It needs to be challenged and dispensed with.

No-One Wonders Where They Are

Oy, what a week. Our enrollments are mysteriously up about 4%, with many new students apparently choosing us at the last minute. So this meant I was called in to do last-minute advising, having made the very serious mistake of answering the telephone and/or responding to my email in the week before the start of the semester. This means I spent a lot of today explaining to a bunch of whippersnappers why if they really wanted full-time status (as they all do for financial aid reasons) they were sort of screwed with a ludicrous schedule of 9AM-9PM Tuesdays-Thursdays where they're taking Weight Training, Organic Chemistry, 19th Century Music Theory, Macroeconomics & Quilting, Homeland Security Studies, and Literature of My Left Nut: if you wait until the last day before the semester to register, you take what you can get. Let this be a lesson to any of our college-aged readers. Increase the Peace, Just Say No, and stop being such a bunch of total moral degenerates, or I'll sic Victor David Hanson on you, see if I don't.

Anyway. Vacation pix of the kids. Thanks to my brother, whose pix they are.