Nickelodeon shows a brief program at 5 in the morning showing how some American young people are opposed to the United States committing torture. The program also shows how certain American kids are horrified when their government starts a pointless war that kills children in another country. On top of that, we see American young people opposed to children in other countries working in factories.
Wingnuttia goes berserk, on the grounds that the Nickelodeon program undermines American values.
The American values of, uh, torture, child labor, and the death of children in pointless wars fought for dishonest reasons.
It's hardly news that Maureen Dowd is a shallow, bitchy Mean Girl more interested in fashion and surfaces than policy. Her place on the NYTimes opinion page reveals the lie that feminism has accomplished all it needed to and we're done with it: she's taking a place which rightly belongs to Digby or Echidne or Katha Pollitt and filling it with gossipy crap, confirming with every word she writes snotty misogynist ideas about what women are interested in and what they're "really" like. Let's fact check today's excretion, shall we?
The former American first lady, the one who’s supposed to be
brimming over with feminist impulses, has ignored and overlooked her
husband’s peccadilloes for the greater gain of keeping her marriage
intact, as she tries to return to the gilded perch and run the White
House.
Cécilia Sarkozy acts so American, while Hillary Clinton acts so French.
Cécilia at one point left her marriage to go to New York and seek love
American-style, while Hillary lost the public love in the ’90s when she
tried French-style health care reform.
Okay, MoDo, let's play your game. Bill cheated, yeah. A couple of times. And she stayed with him because she loved him, because the marriage was worth more to her than that, because.... hell, I don't know why. And you know what? I don't care. The interworkings of other people's marriages are a mystery to everyone. No one knows what goes on inside a marriage. No one. And that's a good thing.
This idea that Hillary isn't quite feminist enough because she didn't tell him to pound salt the first time pisses me off. How the hell do you, oh spinster Dowd, claim to know why she acted as she did? Fuck you.
And Hillary "lost the love" of the American people with health care? An interesting assertion: one would almost think that she hadn't been forced to change her hair ten times during the campaign or come up with a cookie recipe to show that she was a "real" woman. One might even point to a focused advertising blitz on the part of the insurance industry, concerned Harry and Louise poring over their bills and wondering what Hillarycare would mean for them, or the wingnuts, who these days love their data-mining, but who, in 1993, were quite busy ginning up paranoia about having all your health history encoded onto a card you carried with you. Indeed, wouldn't the country have been better off if she had succeeded? At the time, the plan's being "Too French" was not even a consideration. Of course, at that time "French" wasn't wingnut slang for "cowardly Islamosympathizing feminazi" either. Just keep slipping the buzzwords in there, MoDo. I hope they're paying you in Botox and Manolo Blahniks.
Shall we go on?
You know MoDo is in trouble when she turns to Caitlin "I Love Being a Stay-at-Home Mom with a Staff!" Flanagan, about whose perspectives on actual women's lives I am, shall we say, skeptical.
Now that Mark Penn believes women can carry her to victory, Hillary speaks girlfriend to girlfriend.
That tack, Caitlin Flanagan writes in The Atlantic, would only work if
she were “willing to let us women in on the big, underlying struggle of
her life that is front and center in our understanding of who she is as
a woman. Her husband’s sexual behavior, quite apart from the private
pain that it has caused her, has also sullied her deepest — and most
womanly — ideals and convictions, for the Clintons’ political
partnership has demanded that she defend actions she knows to be
indefensible. To call her husband a philanderer is almost to whitewash
him, for he’s used women far less sophisticated, educated and powerful
than he — women particularly susceptible to the rake’s characteristic
blend of cajolery and deceit — for his sexual gratification.
“In glossing over her husband’s actions and abetting his efforts to
squirm away from the scrutiny and judgment they provoke, Hillary has
too often lapsed into her customary hauteur and self-righteousness and
added to the pain delivered upon these women.”
MoDo then points out that "hauteur" is, of course, French. I am not making this up.
The brilliant Molly Ivins used to say that, in the 1970's, when she told people she was a feminist, they assumed she was easy. By the 1990's, they assumed she was a lesbian. I note this because there's apparently some form of conservative feminism in which sexual continence is the sine qua non, but I don't remember ever having picked that up in my feminist theory classes (which I took with some pretty prominent people). I guess the point is that, as a woman, she should have sided with the women in every case, but in at least one, the charges are dodgy at best.
And the transparent snobbery of Flanagan's assertion that "he’s used women far less sophisticated, educated and powerful
than he — women particularly susceptible to the rake’s characteristic
blend of cajolery and deceit — for his sexual gratification" would be laughable if it weren't so hateful. Women learn to detect bullshit in men pretty early, actually, and it doesn't take a lot of sophistication or education to blow off an unwanted pass.
Bill was raised by a single mom in a trailer park--it's no real surprise that his tastes ran to women of the class into which he was born. I always maintained that a large part of his charm was the implied stink of trailer-park sex, cheese curls and beer. Yes, he grew out of the trailer park, but we never grow out of where we came from, not really. He lived most of his life with Hillary, the wife he aspired to, but I don't think anyone should be shocked at the backsliding into class--it happens all the time.
And "cajolery and deceit"? Did he ever pretend not to be married? The idea that a woman who sleeps with a married man has to be "cajoled" is laughable--betcha MoDo has a married scalp or two hanging from her belt. And I'll bet she knew it at the time.
Flanagan also brings up the "she abandoned the cat!" idiocy, which would only have legs if one assumed that, like a cookie recipe or a haircut, proving her femininity was in any way a qualification for public office. Or that giving a cat to a family friend was abandoning it. (UPDATE: My mistake: it was Bill's dog Buddy who was run over in traffic, in the relatively quiet town of Chappaqua, NY. He got another dog.)
It goes on like that, with the standard list of Hillary insults: opportunism, secrecy, ruthlessness, cold-eyed, mannish (more manly than Obama, MoDo declares), and, a new one: "the debate dominatrix."
Huh. I though we used to just call them "winners."
Below: MoDo and Caitlin explain Hillary to the boys.
No matter how many Legos you have in your house (we have approximately 234 million ourselves), your children will find a reason to fight to the death over 4 or 5 very specific Lego pieces that they can never actually find.
You can look on this observation as a Profound Comment on the Human Condition if you like, but all I'm really saying is that kids can be very, very annoying.
The other day Steve M. puzzled over a poll
suggesting that in a three-way matchup, Stephen Colbert would take away
more votes from Giuliani than from Clinton--his puzzlement summed up in
the post title ("EITHER THEY THINK GIULIANI'S WHOLE ACT IS A JOKE OR
THEY THINK COLBERT'S ISN'T")....
I have a feeling you could run a bowl of lime Jell-O as a third-party
candidate and it would get upwards of 5%, coming disproportionately
from Republicans....Polling three-ways at this stage of the game tells
us much less about the appeal of the third candidate than it does about
the level of disaffection with the other two (which in this case looks
like it's higher among Republicans).
Yet Tom thinks there is even more to the story than that. Just like a certain number of conservatives liked All in the Family even though it wasn't supposed to be a "conservative" show,
They liked Archie Bunker because he said things they weren't 'allowed'
to say. They took a fictitious character created to mock them and made
him their own.
Which, I think, is happening (to a lesser
degree) with Colbert. There are a fair number of conservatives who get
that his act is a joke and that the joke is supposed to be on them, and
they embrace him anyway--because they like his attitude.
There is something to this. But I'd also speculate (it would be irresponsible not to) that there's another itch being scratched here. "Movement conservatives" of the sort whose opinions about things one often encounters online are obviously fond of denouncing Hollyweird, but they also frequently display a rather desperate desire for the movies and the teevee to like them, to really like them. (For an analysis of this phenomenon see Edroso, R., hereet passim.)
Colbert is currently cool, they want to be cool, so there you go.
(By the way, I apologize to Tom in advance for employing the ethically dubious and quite radical practice of quoting only parts of what he said and then linking to the rest. That's just not how blogs should work. I go to the box, you know, two minutes, and I feel shame.)
(And, of course, it should go without saying that the wingnut article of faith that Greenwald's used sockpuppets turns out to be bullshit, but what the hell, let's point it out anyway.)
Speaking as the dad of little children, the insanely ubiquitous mass marketing of this new Seinfeld Bee Movie thing has already made me loathe this film far more than I have ever loathed anything ever, including Hitler, badly prepared omelets, and people who take Jonah Goldberg seriously.
And this interview with Jerry S didn't make me feel any better. The headline:
Jerry Seinfeld creates buzz for 'Bee Movie'
Oh, fuck you. Person who wrote that headline, come over here and I will give you a "honey" of a punch in the snout... (searches mentally for another stupid "bee" pun while temper rises)... fuckface! (Feels satisfied with self that "fuckface" is rhetorically superior to any hypothetical "bee" pun)
And then there's this:
Seinfeld's legacy is such that you wonder why he
does anything but sit around and count his money. Yet, here he is: on
the stump, shilling for "Bee Movie," his upcoming animated comedy, the
biggest post-NBC-TV-series move of his career. He's as cool as a
cucumber. Except as regards the bee thing. (The world's honeybee
population has been mysteriously disappearing since 2005). They're
apparently sick, these bees. Or slacking off. While denying that the
entire apiary community is involved in an elaborate DreamWorks-inspired
publicity stunt on behalf of his film, Seinfeld does recognize that the
timing is odd - the bees in "Bee Movie" are on strike, too.
"How weird is that?" he asks, smiling a smile that's been seen in 26
languages. "I think they're closing in on the causes now; they think
it's some kind of viral thing. But I don't know how they're going to
get bees to take antibiotics."
Apart from everything else, antibiotics don't work on viruses.... FUCKFACE.
I hope every bee in America dies this winter so that this overhyped oversold probably unfunny piece of shit comes to be seen as shameful and tasteless and cruel and is never spoken of again ever and I hope every person involved in its creation and marketing dies alone and unloved trying to mainline honey in some squalid tenement room littered with defiled promotional items, half-gnawed offal, and discarded stingers.
Anyway I'll probably have to watch the fucking thing at some point, and I really don't fucking want to. No matter how much it sucks it will force itself onto my TV somehow, like that abominable Jim Carrey Cat in the Hat rat-turd of cinematic misery did: only this time the marketing fuckers are far more coordinated, far more ruthless, far more bloody-minded and horrid. FUCKERS.
My moral superiority over liberals is clear, because I know how to pretend that torture is acceptable when practiced by the American government.
I don't believe that "reasonable minds" can disagree on whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture. If you're making an argument that something is almost but not quite torture and thus might perhaps be morally acceptable behavior, you're already necessarily arguing from a thoroughly disgusting moral position.
About Mukasey's confirmation to AG, the reason McCarthy is waterboard-weaseling in the first place: what Scott said. I'm going to go not think about these sociopaths for a while...
(Jonah Goldberg thinks politics today are so very nasty and mean because Ted Kennedy said mean things about Robert Bork, leaving Republicans no alternative but to make stuff up about Bill Clinton's sex life. Wheeeeee!)
ALL they do is act like assholes. That's it. The only thing they do is find someone they can gang up on and give shit to -- period. It doesn't even matter if the reason they're going after someone makes sense or not: they want to collect a scalp and act like a mob. Let's get someone fired! Let's all pile on! They're just a bunch of horrible little spooky pissant shits.
I hate these fuckers.
Let us play.
Apparently a day or so ago, who cares, a McClatchey (formerly Knight-Ridder, of course) reporter posted the following to his blog. It made the entire wingnuttosphere go nuts. See if you can figure out why:
Lima is beautiful in the spring, when it’s not too hot, I was told.
Machu Pichu is a must see, too.
My visits to the Green Zone are always a joy when I pass through
checkpoints manned by Peruvian troops, with whom I have established a
rapport. Sure, they are sticklers for rules, but unlike Ugandan troops
who have the warmth of armed robots the Peruvians are simply simpatico.
They are a friendly group with easy smiles. They’ll chat you up
while being frisked a pad down with benefits. They’ll engage you in
conversation once they discover you speak their language.
The experience isn’t nearly the same with other multinational
forces. The Ugandan troops are often terse. While not mean, their
reticence often makes one feel like one of the many sheep being herded
through Baghdad’s many checkpoints.
The Americans, however, are the absolute worst. I had a testy
exchange Tuesday with an American soldier at an entry checkpoint into
the Green Zone.
Most of my entries into the Green Zone had been by car. I was
running late to cover a news conference (because one of my security
folks was late for work), and we decided to take a short cut through
the Green Zone, instead of driving all the way around to get to the
Iraqi foreign minister’s office. We had no trouble getting in. (Read the story here.)
We parked the car, and I headed out of the Green Zone (along with
one member of my security staff) to attend the news conference. Getting
out is seldom ever a problem.
When the news conference was over, we headed back.
That’s when trouble started.
At the first check point, a pair of Ugandan soldiers asked for
identification. We showed our military-issued badges. Unbeknownst to
us, we were supposed to be carrying an additional form of ID.
He asked for a passport. I told him I didn’t have it on me. (The
advice is to lock up your passport once in Baghdad and never take it
out until departing.) He asked for another form of ID, and I replied
that I didn’t have anything else.
The American soldier assigned by the U.S. military to oversee this particular checkpoint came over to investigate the problem.
He asked if I had a driver’s license on me. I told him I didn’t have
one. He looked incredulous. Why would I need a driver’s license in
Baghdad; I wouldn’t be driving, I told him.
He took offense at my response.
Then he looked at the second ID of my companion. It was a badge
issued by our newspaper. He said it wouldn’t do. Besides, he asked,
what is Knight Ridder?
“I never heard of it,” he said. He probably would have never heard
of McClatchy, either. (We use Knight Ridder because it already had a
bureau in Baghdad before the chain was bought by the McClatchy Co.)
I explained that it’s one of the largest newspaper companies in the
United States. It owns the Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, the Kansas
City Star.
“I know the Miami Herald, he said. I used to live there. But I never
heard of Knight Ridder.” He began to chuckle, pronouncing the company
as Knight Rider. Perhaps his chuckles stemmed from memories of the
1980s television show “Night Rider.” He then seemed to mock us.
We couldn’t call for an escort, because he wouldn’t let us switch on
our cell phones. (Cell phone batteries need to be removed at most
checkpoints.) If we wanted to use our cell phones, we would have to
make the far walk beyond the barricades and razor wire. We would have
to put ourselves in danger by standing out in the middle of downtown
Baghdad where I could become a potential target. (As required, I was
wearing my body armour, despite the heat.)
With nothing to lose I decided to get pushy.
I asked him how he could not possibly know that Knight Ridder was
one of the country’s largest newspaper chains. I told him that we’re
bigger than the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times.
“I’m from Atlanta. I only know the Journal,” he said.
“I thought you said you also knew the Miami Herald,” I retorted.
“We’re bigger than the Journal,” I replied. “You never heard of Knight Ridder?”
He didn’t want to be embarrassed. He already looked irritated. He asked me if I knew the number of the military’s media office.
“I would if you’d let me switch on my phone,” I snapped. “What’s the
use of these media badges if people like you aren’t going to honor
them? Is this for nothing? Why don’t you call? That’s your job, isn’t
it?” I made it known that I was jotting down his name.
My security man was struggling with a smirk on his face. He knew my plan. I was going to bully my way back into the Green Zone.
The man with the gun glowered as I continued my barrage of protests.
The Ugandan soldiers were oblivious to the commotion, despite the
growing line behind me.
The American soldier called another soldier on his radio to ask if he had ever heard of “Knight Ridder.”
To my relief, the voice said that, yes, Knight Ridder is one of the
country’s biggest newspaper companies, that it owned many of the country’s largest newspapers.
The soldier in front of us explained the situation to his colleague.
The voice on the other side suggested that we be let through, that the
media office would only instruct him to simply confirm if the pictures
on our media badges matched the ones on our shoulders.
When you’ve got nothing to lose, I told my security officer, you do what it takes. He nodded in agreement.
And that's it.
You won't find the post online: the wingnut explosion made the guy pull down his blog. Hundreds of wingnuts gathered in his comments to say that they hate him.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that unless you're plugged into the wingnut hate machine you would read that and either (1) not care about it one way or another or (2) think it's a decent bit of writing.
Literally every major right-wing-blog has posted about this, and they think this guy deserves to be fired.
I think they are absolutely full of shit and I can't figure out why they're not ashamed of themselves.
It's hardly news that Maureen Dowd is a shallow, bitchy Mean Girl more interested in fashion and surfaces than policy. Her place on the NYTimes opinion page reveals the lie that feminism has accomplished all it needed to and we're done with it: she's taking a place which rightly belongs to