Whiskey Fire

Empties Crushed and Thrown Away

Well, 2007 is gone. Bye!

Anyway, you'll be excited to know that according to very very wingnutty Media Research Center, the winner of the "Dynamic Duo Award for Idolizing Bill and Hillary" was... Chris Matthews.

I am not making that up. (Also, it's "hoist WITH his own petard," god fucking dammit.)

And the grim fact we must face is, 2008 will probably be even dumber than 2007.  Gah.

See you then.

The Teaching Tool

From The Corner, and I wish I could make stuff like this up:

Wondering about the early response to Fred Thompson’s closing argument to the people of Iowa, I just spent a moment skimming the comments on YouTube.  About a fifth of the several hundred posts seem unimpressed, but the rest are positive—many simply glowing. A sampling:

Wow!

Please credit me. Then kill me!

Thers' Iron Law of Political Primaries: When you're reduced to trawling the fucking You Tube comments for positive feedback for your campaign, you're totally fucked.

Thompson's a corpse. But we knew that.

I'd be Bored and Disappointed If They Didn't

The Politico is surely the most wonderful source of cutting-edge political information on any of the Internets, because whenever I look at it, I discover something I didn't know. For instance, today I learned that all of us Liberal Bloggers  are totally shocked and horrified and terribly, terribly upset that the NY Times has hired William Kristol as its new opinion columnist.

The New York Times’ hiring of Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol to write for its op-ed page caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere Friday night, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons.

I was away this past weekend doing family holiday stuff, and so I missed this, but I've been clicking around and I can't find a single liberal blogger calling for canceled subscriptions. Neither can I find much "frenzy." There's a lot of snark, and a lot of head shaking, but not anger. I'm not much surprised that the NYT has hired a thuggish wingnut clown. Who would be, who follows these things? Kristol is a joke -- a sick one, but still a joke; if that's the direction the NYT wants to go, well, on their heads be it. Too bad for them. And our public discourse. But no liberal blogger actually believes the NYT has positively contributed to that very much for the last couple of decades, primarily because they seem to want to define "intellectual diversity" as "treating lunatics like Bill Kristol seriously."

The simple fact is, Kristol is an extremist ideologue who is almost always wrong and doesn't especially care about that. That's simply accurate, and it's not "intolerant" to say so.

As for the online wingnuts who are screeching about how the liberals are screeching over this nonsense, well, they truly seem to believe that the NYT is the Master of the Liberal Universe, so they'll believe pretty much anything.   

Anyway, I emailed the author of the Politico article about who exactly was demanding subscription-canceling. I feel like that Confederate Yankee guy, bravely fact-checking an ass, and so forth. Whee! I am a Citizen Journalist.

UPDATE: The author, Michael Calderone, responds! This Citizen Journamilising sure gets results. He informs me that the stuff about the "frenzy" in Teh Liberal Blogosphere and all the subscription-canceling stuff was based entirely on the comments thread of the HuffPo post that broke the story of the Kristol hire.

I had not previously known that the Huffington Post comments threads constituted "the liberal blogosphere." Again, thanks, Politico, for informing me of new information!

As I understand how this Citizen Journalism thing works, now we're supposed to visit the guy's house and then try to get him fired. Maybe I'll just have another beer, though.

The Amazing Rockethead

by Molly Ivors

Did you ever get the feeling that the pundits really do read blogs?

What else could possibly be the reasoning behind Maureen Dowd's column describing her cleansing rituals for the new year? It has to be a witty performance piece in the mode of the far smarter Jon Swift, utilizing the techniques of juvenalian satire to parody the image of the shallow Sex-and-the-Cityish vixen she's so carefully cultivating. Clearly, this is a parallel to the episode in which Miranda dyes, then shaves, her pubic hair.

Or not. Because this is even dumber.

Riding the crest of 1997 Redbook fashion, MoDo decides to go public (note the "L") with her New Year's preparations. And no, it doesn't include any actual bathing or waxing: it's all about chakras and chi.

Faith, the faith healer, is twirling a crystal over my green couch.

The pendulum is hovering above a chart, pointing to sources of negative energy in my house that need to be cleared.

The pendulum quivers and swings and slows and finally settles above the word “Curses.”

“That sounds scary,” I say.

Faith — yes, that’s her real name — explains that there are two common forms of curses. If you send out something negative, you also hold on to it. It’s like a cosmic fax machine. “So,” she says, “it has a definite negative impact on the soul.”

“I hope that doesn’t include writing critical columns,” I mumble.

Speechless, really.

Faith puts stones under my back and tells me she can feel my heart opening like a flower blooming. I don’t really feel the blockages or the bloomings. But it’s a lot nicer lying on a table and listening to floaty, flute-y New Age music than it is sitting at a table and making a long list of insincere resolutions.

Resolutions, you see, are hard. And dull. And sometimes people don't keep them. New Age, on the other hand, is effortless. You just hire a consultant and you yourself don't have to do anything or rethink anything or change anything. Perfect for the Idiot Princess.

Don't get me wrong: I have great respect for people whose traditions include management of the numinous, providing they do no damage to others, but bullshit dilletantes who simultaneously  invoke and sneer at other people's cultural traditions piss me off. Is it creepier to own Marilyn Monroe's purse, or to have someone tell you that owning Marilyn Monroe's purse can bring bad karma, or to dismiss this because you really like owning Marilyn Monroe's purse? Dizzying, truly.

Like I said, it has to be performance art.

Or possibly she's just cementing her niche in preparation for her new pagemate.

Below: MoDo shows Bill Kristol where the coffee machine is.

All the Way

Aaaahrg. My dad's horrible comupter ate a great fucking post. Feh. See you tomorrow. FUCK.

Overfed Rats

Glenn Reynolds says that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: Giggle, Giggle, I Just Made Boom-Boom, is "sure to make a splash." So's the log you'll drop if you spend all day eating nothing but bran muffins, though that would smell better. Reynolds also believes that the book has liberal bloggers "in a tizzy." Sir, I have not yet begun to tizz.   

There's also a podcast that you can listen to featuring Reynolds, Goldberg, and Reynolds' wife, Dr. Helen. You can listen that, if you like -- though if you're the kind of person who like that class of stuff, you're surely the sort of person who would enjoy singing along with this:

The Answer to All God's Problems

by Molly Ivors

While Thers struggles with his father's pokey Windows 98 computer on the other side of The Royal Borough, I am here working on his mother's pedal-operated machine.

I think I'll make a quilt.

No, I think I'll abuse Russell Roberts, whose annoying commentary gave us quite a lot to talk about on the way down.

NPR is apparently running a series called "Au Contraire," in which the cruel conventional wisdom of commentators and pundits (and presumably bloggers) is blown away by pure ol' sunny optimism in the mode of Shirley Temple or possibly KLo. (Hands out prophylactic brain bleach for those considering KLo singing "The Good Ship Lollipop" in a minidress.) Roberts is apparently an economics professor at George Mason University, and quite demonstrably something of a twat (with apologies to twats everywhere). He has one message for America.

Chin Up, Little Campers!

Russell wants to warn us about "stories and subplots designed to scare us, told by politicians and people with their own agenda. Let's not let them push us around, whether they're on the Right or the Left, Republican or Democrat."

That's right: my problem is those big bullies Paul Krugman and Atrios, the latter of whom has adjusted his definition of The Big Shitpile to Jenga, the children's game which eventually comes tumbling down. Why have Krugman and Atrios--also both with PhDs in Economics--done this to me? Because they're big mean meanies who own stock in Lunesta, apparently.

Roberts tells me everything's okay.

My New Year's Wish for America is that we be skeptical of falling sky stories and that as a result, we all sleep better.
............
The subprime mortgage crisis isn't going to ruin the economy. After years of appreciation, falling housing prices aren't a disaster. Home ownership will remain near or at an all-time high.

China isn't going to steal our prosperity or our jobs. They can't. If they keep selling us toys with lead paint, we'll stop buying them. Meanwhile, they play Santa Claus, and the American economy keeps creating more jobs.
.......
None of this is meant to defend the economic status quo. Or a Republican president. Or a Democratic Congress. I slept just as well in the 90's, when we had a Democratic president and a Republican Congress.
..........
Chill out! Read more arguments on the other side. The optimists usually have some decent arguments. Maybe they're right! Learn some economics. It's working for me!

Breathtaking, truly. From his perspective, people who used the equity in their overpriced houses to put their kids through school deserve the "correction" of homelessness.  Kids brain-damaged from lead paint? Punish the Chinese economy by not buying their toys! And reading the Kristols and the Corner is going to soothe us back to sleep.

Immigration, the shrinking middle class, unemployment, the falling dollar.... it's all good in Robertsland.

I'm no economist (that's why, generally speaking, I trust real ones), but I can see that things are coming to a head, and fast. Just as global warming seems more intense and desperate by the day, the economy of the United States seems to be unraveling at an alarming pace, at least to me. I'm not generally a hair-on-fire sort of person who, as Roberts says "likes to get steamed." I just see what I see and draw conclusions from my reading and experiences, and the conclusions I'm drawing concern me greatly these days.

Perhaps this is because for many years I cobbled together part-time jobs. Now that I have a full-time permanent position, I guess I thought things would settle. But as it happens, I hit it just as the Jenga game started wobbling, and I'll be honest: I am afraid. And some twat touting American exceptionalism is not going to help me sleep.

Oh, and Roberts is a Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution , so you know that he has no political agenda whatsoever! Because remember: "the sky usually doesn't fall"! WooHoo!

More Pain Than That

For these holidays I am at my dad's. He runs Windows '98 and his Internet connection involves some sort of obscure theurgy. I thus do not know if this post will get through. If it does not, the Internet will be all the poorer. Let us therefore pray.

Anyhoo. I stand by my last post. Nothing the American military is currently doing abroad has any bearing whatsoever upon the degree of liberty enjoyed by any American citizen. To suggest otherwise is absurd. Had we not invaded Iraq, would any American be any less "free," any less capable of dissent, free expression, the vote, fucking around on YouTube, whatever?

No.

And it is no insult to the troops to suggest this. American liberty does not, practically, theoretically, or philosophically, depend upon American armed force. There are no foreign powers capable of threatening essential American liberties -- yes, there are assorted maniacs and thugs, but, well, we are under no threat of invasion.

To be blunt. I owe to no member of the American armed forces any gratitude for the exercise of my liberties as an American citizen. I respect their service but I am not in their debt in any regard. In particular, this exercise of American armed intervention in Iraq is in fact anti-democratic and injurious to American liberty, and for that reason should never have been undertaken, and needs to end.

Quality of Steel

Huh.

Merry Christmas   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

from all of us to all of you.

Thank you for being an essential part of all that is successful here at National Review Online. We're grateful for your loyalty and support — and, of course, your clicks!

This morning we have foremost in our thoughts those who are not with us — those who are serving abroad so that we can celebrate in freedom and those who have left us, in our service, in His, through the natural but heart-wrenching cycles of life. For those who serve and for those who are in pain this Christmas, a special prayer. May God be your comfort and your hope.

Merry Christmas. And a bipartisan wish for, yes,  "peace on earth."

Yeah, well, fuck you.

The hard, cold, brutal fact is that not a single American man or woman under arms in Iraq ever, ever had to be there to preserve the ability of Americans to "celebrate in freedom." Whatever the fuck that means. You sent good people to die, and a million Iraqi souls are dead, for nothing but the most squalid of purposes.

Peace? Peace without truth?

The National Review has played a thoroughly pernicious role in modern American culture and nobody remotely connected with that den of swinish lying fools deserves anything other than scorn. Fuck you most sincerely in this holiday season, traitors.

Assholes.

No, no holiday truces. Fuck you.

And, of course, God, if he exists, also thinks you're a pack of smarmy little shits. 

Merry Christmas

From the rug rats and tired adults on Liberal Mountain.