Whiskey Fire

Submarine Teams

Way back months ago I said the following about The Mets:

So do the Mets suck? I believe this is a misplaced line of inquiry.

Here is what will happen. The Mets will spectacularly collapse exactly 15 minutes after it is generally conceded that they are Legitimate Contenders.

I'd still like to be proved wrong. Look, I'm a Mets fan -- praise Delgado & pass the batteries. But, like, I just knew these fuckers were going to pull this shit.

Grouchy. Grouchy Thers.

A Salty Salute

Wow, Teh Corner is just not stopping with the funny today. K-Lo:

No New York or D.C. bar owners e-mailed offering an NRO debate-watching home.

Weird -- you'd think any bar owner would just jump at the chance to advertise that Jonah and K-Lo are going to watch a debate at their place on a Friday Night. They would pack 'em in even better than they would with "Public Domain Karaoke Nite" or "$2 Shots for Ladies & Guys with Restraining Orders Thirst-Daze!"

Declaring Our Emergency

From The Hill: the White House is for some reason not excited by McCain's ludicrous idea that he must race back to Washington to Save the Economy in manner of Fiscal Batman or similar:

The White House said Wednesday it welcomes GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s call for a bipartisan solution to the ongoing financial crisis, but a spokeswoman stopped short of endorsing McCain's call for the president to convene a bipartisan summit to find a solution.

Clearly, Bush is worried that having McCain around will drag down his approval ratings.

MORE. Jonah Goldberg will shortly announce that McCain cannot debate because of his war injuries, and liberals are mean for suggesting otherwise. Bets?

FURTHER: One of Jonah's genius e-mailers:

I think McCain should show up for the debate looking reluctant and disheveled.  He could apologize for this condition, saying he had to rush back from doing the nation’s business.  He could be like Grant having to apologize to the impeccably dressed Lee at Appomattox for showing up all muddy and in an old private’s coat.  There was, after all, a war that needed winning.

For this to work you would need to actually have won the war. For McCain, this will perhaps not have been the case. But at least looking "disheveled" might save McCain several thousand dollars in make-up artistry, a nice gesture in these difficult times.

EVEN MORE FUN! Apparently the Corner e-mailers (and if you were looking to unload some Nigerian investment opportunities, wouldn't you just kill for the NRO subscription list) think it would be a great idea to send Palin as McCain's stand-in.

However...

McCain then looked around the room and gestured as if to welcome questions. The AP reporter shouted a question at Gov. Palin (“Governor, what have you learned from your meetings?”) but McCain aide Brooke Buchanan intervened and shepherded everybody out of the room.

Palin looked surprised, leaned over to McCain and asked him a question, to which your pooler thinks he shook his head as if to say “No.”

Palin should go, but with a satellite hookup to McCain so he can tell her what to answer, as soon as he gets it sent to him by his handlers talking into his earphone.

FINALLY. I'm not the only one enjoying himself immensely right now.

Your liberal media

by flory

Nice Polite Republican radio is being all fair and balanced again this morning. The Diane Roehm show,  guest hosted by Frank Sezno -- whose day job last I checked was at that bastion of hippiedom, CNBC -- spent an hour talking about the bailout package. His guests? Norm Ornstein of AEI and the former president of the St Louis Fed, whose current wingnut welfare gig is at the Cato Institute.

Must suck to be a conservative and never, ever get to hear your side of the issues in the media.

Applause

Vaulting into the lead for the most absurd and bigoted pre-fab wingnut explanation for the Financial Meltdown is Michelle Malkin, who blames -- you'll never guess it in a million years -- illegal immigrants! Oh, wait. You guessed it. Anyhow, sorry Mark Krikorian, you're now just Number Two (pre-adolescent humor intended).

Let Me Assist You

by Molly Ivors

Dear Maureen Dowd,

I know they were your golden years, honey, but it's not all about the Clenis anymore. Is there any topic you can't work around to attack the Boy Who Said No?

Love,
Molly

Smear It Around

by Molly Ivors

True: since I spent 12 years in Catholic school, I am acquainted and Facebook-connected to some O'Reilly-esque souls who represent my sole connection to Greater Wingnuttia (as I do not generally have the intestinal fortitude to go spelunking withe Thers). One fellow tells me in his news feed that the WSJ yesterday published an expose of, well, pretty commonly known information about Barack Obama and WIlliam Ayers.

Huh. You'd think they'd be distrracted from all that this week, wouldn't you? Or that if they were going digging in history they'd look for a more pointed comparison to the present moment, like, say, the Keating 5 scandal?

Guess not. Things must be swimming along so well that they can afford to obsess over who served on what local committees with whom, and where the meetings and bake sales were being held.

Looks like they don't need that bailout after all. Whew!

Trapped, Tricked, Packaged

Ah, Mark Krikorian, you lovable godawful braindead goober! What caused the financial meltdown? Political Correctness.

I have no way of judging whether the Wall Street bailout is a necessary evil or an impending disaster. But we're in this mess, ultimately, because our political elites thought it was good social policy to encourage banks to give mortgages to uncreditworthy people, resulting in what Sailer months ago called the "Diversity Recession" (if this doesn't work, make that the Diversity Depression). In other words, if poor people in general, or blacks or Hispanics in particular, were less likely to be approved for a mortgage, the only possible reason was racism or classism or whatever. Thus "creditworthiness" was an illegitimate, dead-white-male concept, like middleclassness.

It was also a fear of being unfairly called racist that made investment banks buy up all those bad loans and try to transmute them into investment gold by inventing ingenious new forms of financial alchemy. And what else but a terror of not seeming "PC" could possibly explain "the creation of a parallel depository banking system (a.k.a. the money market mutual fund industry) without any sort of insurance fund (either public or private) and only cursory regulation"? The obvious motivation there was to avoid looking "biased" against minorities.

Who, in the final analysis, is more responsible for the current crisis -- Wall Street or Oprah Winfrey? The answer, my friends, could not be more clear.

Wall Street loved African-Americans not wisely, but too well. I only hope impoverished minority groups will have the simple decency to do the right thing and apologize to all the corporate tycoons they have so cruelly betrayed. For shame!

(Sometimes you have to hand it to Greater Wingnuttia -- there really is nothing they won't say.)

The Textbook Committee

by Molly Ivors

As I get older, I come more and more to value the Victorian novel. They understood things about the nature of human frailty and stupidity that you just don't get from an episode of The Bad Girls' Club or even I Love New York 2. And so laying awake in the wee hours, calculating the damage of the proposed bailout, I began searching for a parallel in literature. I considered and rejected Mark Renton, locked in a room screaming "I just want a fucking hit!" as well, not Victorian.

And then it struck me.

In George Eliot's sweeping masterwork Middlemarch, the petty values and noble aspirations of a small town are parsed with cringe-inducing accuracy. There's the thwarted ambition of Lydgate, Casaubon's dead hand of the past, the greed and self-importance of Featherstone, the pious arrogance of Bulstrode, sure, but also Dorothea's genuine concern for others, the warmth and generosity of the Garths, the bittersweet longing of Farebrother--that's all part of it, too.

But I found myself dwelling on the path of poor, dumb Fred Vincy.

There's nothing much wrong with Fred, really. He went to University and developed a gentleman's skills with the intention of taking up a gentleman's profession (specifically, he studied for the ministry, but never took his exams). He's counting on inheriting a chunk of money from his cranky Uncle Featherstone, partly because he loves the plain and plain-spoken Mary Garth, who is the daughter of a small estate manager (as was Marian Evans, for wht that's worth) and needs the means to marry her.

But Fred's an idiot. He's in debt, and thinks labor--you know, jobs like regular people have--is beneath him. Though his roots are solidly middle-class (his father owns a factory and is involved in local politics), the family is prosperous enough so that he can ape a gentleman's lifestyle, but without the real means to sustain it. More troublingly, he gambles, and loses often. He falls into debt. When his uncle gives him a gift of a hundred pounds (zip through to 1:45 for a fairly accurate retelling), he spends it on a horse he fails to break, thus losing it. He confesses that Mary's father, Caleb Garth, has lent him more money, money the family has set aside to purchase her brother's apprenticeship and assure his future, and loses that too.

Mary was Fred's childhood sweetheart, but she refuses to marry him because he trains for a profession he's clearly unsuited for, and then because he acquires debts he can't pay. "It would be a disgrace," she tells him, "If I accepted a man who got into debt and wouldn't work."

I think you can see where I'm going with this. It's not until people stop giving Fred money that he realizes that he can't be a twat* all his life. Eventually, he agrees to work off his debt by training with Mr. Garth to be an estate manager, something he actually turns out to be kind of good at. And Mary agrees to marry him once he does.

Maybe if some of these Wall Street fellows had read a book, they wouldn't have ended up like Feckless Fred. But since they have, it might be time to go into the fields with Caleb Garth and work for a living. Then we, as Mary Garth, might be willing to help him out.

But now, it would be a disgrace to accept a man who got into debt and wouldn't work.

*As always, to be read in the British sense, as in Shaun of the Dead or similar.

On Whiskey Ships

I'm teaching the Irish Lit course again, which is nice, because if I want to spend a solid week discussing the historical Easter Rising, I can, so as the students can have a prayer of grasping Yeats's "Easter 1916" in all its ringing ambivalence. Next we're doing "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" and then "Meditations in Time of Civil War." That should take a good month or so. And then we'll review. Only sort of joking here -- I have trouble with this course because I keep wanting to stop and go into digressions about stuff that interests me, and then I forget that there's about 25 more years and 5 poems to cover in the next 2 minutes. The kids seem to have fun, though.

While we're on Irish issues, this amused me -- our old friend Josh Trevino's foray into discussing NI:

One of the curiosities of western Europe’s longest-running armed conflict is how sparse its literature is — and how we must therefore rely on what we have, rather than what we wish to have, when we read about it.

The literature of and on Northern Ireland is "sparse"...?

This contention is, to put it mildly, comic. Trevino's "we" clearly does not include anyone who knows what "libraries" are. (Or even "Nobel Prizes.") I will treasure this "review," though, and I mean that sincerely.

Getting back to the election, there is this. Lonewacko is a dick, but yeah, if you're going to pander to the Scranton Irish, McCain, admit that you're mucking your way into racial inconsistencies when it comes to Mexicans. What, illegal immigration is OK for the palefaces?

From a policy and practical perspective there really is no reason to restrict Irish immigration. But then there's not much reason to worry all that much about immigration at all. The guy currently sticking a gun up at us and saying "I don't need no steeeenking badges or Congressional oversight, I want $700 billion" looks pretty pasty, truth be told.