Whiskey Fire

The Useless Fade In Time

by Molly Ivors

(at right, an AEI Real Fiscal Conservative™, complete with Ken Doll package and G. Gordon Liddy 'stache. Standard model may not include all features seen here.)

Shorter American Enterprise Institute Whores:

Fuck you, working Americans!

While a few of Obama's proposals may be sensible, the overall package would be bad for the economy. Unlike rate cuts for high incomes or reductions in investment taxes, most of Obama's proposed tax cuts would do little to reduce the tax penalty on work and saving. For some households, the penalty on work and saving would even increase because the new tax credits would be phased out as income rises. These proposals wouldn't deliver the economic growth that incentive-based tax cuts would.

See? Only rich people deserve tax cuts! It's simple!

I may be confused: unlike Thers, I have not made the anthropology of wingnuttia my life's work, but I thought that the refrain from the red-meat saliva-drippers on the Right was that taxes are MY MONEY and I can choose how to spend it better than Big Government. If that's the case, then how is a middle-class tax cut bad for the economy? Suddenly, they've rediscovered their Inner Real Conservatives™ and are shocked--shocked, I tell you!--that deficit spending might be in America's Future!

Here's some news, boys. It's fucking here already.

They continue:

Obama would let key parts of the Bush tax cuts expire, causing the top tax rate on ordinary income to go back to 39.6 percent, up from 35 percent today. The capital gains and dividend tax rates would rise to 20 percent from today's 15 percent. Obama might also impose Social Security tax at a rate of up to 4 percent on wages and self-employment income above $250,000, starting in 2019.(emphasis added)

I know I'm in the liberal arts and all that, but let me get this straight: the top tax rate (rumored to begin at $250K) would return to Reagan-era levels, and this is a sign of the apocalypse? People who don't work for their money would have to pay  marginally more (but still significantly less than Thers and I pay on our earned income) for their free money? And an imaginary President Obama might tax people a full three years after he leaves office? It's a miracle!

Enjoy the wilderness, you bastards. You might even have to get a real job!

Now That's a Hit!

Over at Townhall, Matt Barber, a professional wingnut martyr whose head closely resembles a cauliflower, warns us about the totally gay consequences of Barack Ogayma winning the election and turning the White House into the Gay House and filling it with gays and forcibly engayifying the entire country at gay gunpoint once he becomes the Gay President of the United Gay States of Gay. Hence Barber's classy headline:

Obama's Agenda is So "Gay"

And his even classier first paragraph:

If Bill Clinton was the first black president, Barack Obama, if elected, will be the first "gay" president. No, I don't mean he'll personally decorate the West Wing, open a bathhouse in the Rose Garden or take up with Barney Frank. I mean he'll be the most radically pro-homosexual, anti-family president in history. He's very quietly pledged as much to the homosexual "Human Rights Campaign" and other fawning members of his homofascist fan club.

"Homofascist" is a new one on me; it's very tasteful, too, considering how actual fascists tended to behave in regards to homosexuals. But then again if by all contemporary standards of Intellectual Conservatism the quintessence of "fascism" involves Swarthmore educated elementary school teachers, I suppose there's no reason it could not also mean the peacefully expressed desire of same-sex partners to have the same rights as heterosexual grownup Americans. What I'm saying is don't try to follow the logic here too closely or your own head will become as cauliflower-like as Barber's. Or as cream-filled as Jonah Goldberg's, whose book was I believe fact-checked by Twinkie the Kid (who is very probably closeted).

I'm also not sure how "pro-homosexual" means "anti-family," as I'm pro-homosexual (whatever that is when it's at home), and yet I have a family. As does, I observe, Barack Obama. Weird! Barber however helpfully explains that the answer to this conundrum is "San Francisco."

You may have heard the term "San Francisco values" bandied about from time to time. These values do not so much derive from a geographical locale as they do from a shared, deeply engrained "progressive" worldview – a worldview marbled throughout in murky tones of secular humanism and moral relativism. Central to San Francisco values is the notion that the only thing immoral is to reckon there are things immoral.

While Barack Obama may hail from Illinois, Hawaii, Kenya or wherever, his set of core principles – his values – discernibly stem from the underbelly of San Francisco's hyper-sexualized Castro District. The very San Francisco values that brought you the behaviorally driven homosexual AIDS epidemic, San Francisco's public Folsom Street orgy and the preposterous and oxymoronic notion of "gay marriage" are the same values embraced by both homosexual activists and Obama, the latest politico to make 'em light in their loafers.

"Marbled in murky tones" sounds like something Poe would have come up with after bingeing on an inferior class of laudanum, so Barber's lost me there. He's also lost me in foggy San Francisco, where it seems gays want to get married so they can have orgies. If I thought this were true I would feel compelled to warn my gay friends about the realities of marriage, which do not, in my experience anyhow, include orgies (so far, at least). However I suspect that Barber may not be entirely accurate in his account of why gays might want to marry.

He also appears to be wrong about how "Progressives" reject the idea of "immorality." Just off the top of my head I'd say that I find bigotry rather immoral. Perhaps that is however my inner fascist talking.

I also find his last paragraph immoral:

So yes, if elected, Barack Obama – the "change candidate" – will undoubtedly live up to his name. He will certainly institute sweeping change over the next four to eight years. But as you walk into that voting booth on Nov. 4, consider whether Obama's brand of change is change America can afford. Because isn't change – for the mere sake of change – really just chump change?

In all the world there is no spectacle more hideous and frightening and repulsive than that of a Townhall columnist trying to tell a joke. Stay away from my kids, freak.

BREAKING: Obama Card Catalogue Carrying Communist

BREAKING: MUST CREDIT THERS

BARACK OBAMA INVOLVED IN MARXIST WEALTH-SPREADING PLOT AS STATE SENATOR

NOT TOO EARLY TO IMPEACH, EXPERTS SAY

The shocking revelation that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama declared in a seven-year-old National Public Radio interview that he wants to "redistribute wealth" is both shocking and revealing. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in the Communist Manifesto: "Comrades! Increase the tax rates on earners in the top income bracket by three percent. You have nothing to lose but your chains!"

But this is just the ice of the tipberg. An exhaustive WHISKEY FIRE investigation has revealed that as an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama was not merely complicit but actively engaged in the REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH.

FOR THE FIRST TIME we can reveal that Barack Obama was INSTRUMENTAL in a PLOT run by the CHICAGO MACHINE to REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH.

Our crack team of investigative specialists has learned that during the years when Barack Obama was a state senator, from 1972-2006, Barack Obama was deeply involved in an INSIDIOUS PLOT TO TAKE MONEY AWAY FROM TAXPAYERS and "redistribute" it to a shadowy organization known as the "CPL."

So not only did Barack Obama SEIZE the assets of ordinary hardworking Americans, he ACTUALLY THREATENED THOSE WHO DID NOT "PAY UP" with "legal consequences." That is, in Chicago, you could BE IN LEGAL HOT WATER if you tried to EVADE "TAXES." Who could have ever imagined such a lawless nightmarish scenario, in Chicago, of all places?

But the real question is, WHO IS THE "CPL" that Barack Obama wanted ordinary taxpayers to "subsidize" on pain of "prosecution"? FOR THE FIRST TIME WE AT WHISKEY FIRE can reveal WHO THEY ARE and their evil plans for America's Future.

Because we have their Web Site. PLEASE -- TAKE SCREEN SHOTS of the following before they are erased by OBAMA'S GOONS. Barack Obama wants to take YOUR MONEY and give it away for free to people who want to do these terrible things:

* BARACK OBAMA wants your child to BECOME A NINJA.

* BARACK OBAMA wants your child to BE EXPOSED TO "ADULT" LITERATURE.

* BARACK OBAMA wants your child to READ BOOKS THAT THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT HAS CALLED 'OBSCENE."

WHO IS THE "CPL"? At this point we can only speculate, but to me they sound like DOPE FIENDS and RED COMMUNISTS.

But the point is, Barack Obama has ALREADY TAKEN MONEY from taxpayers and REDISTRIBUTED IT to groups with alarming agendas like the "CPL."

When will we as a nation wake up? When will we learn that radical organizations like the "CPL" are just out to bleed us dry and suck our blood, and use it to "buy books" and give them out free to poor people? Is this really what made America great?

This "socialism" stuff is very dangerous, very very dangerous. Why, if frightening radicals like those behind the "CPL" get their way, with "Barry" Obama's help, America might someday become unrecognizable from what it is today. And I think we all know just who exactly does not want that.

The Frozen Dunes

The conspiracy, unmask'd.

The larger point is that the very existence of so many of these radical political partnerships (and that is what they are, significant political partnerships, not mere "marginal relationships," as Smith would have it) reveals a systematic pattern–a pattern that shows Obama to be a man of the left–so far left that he long had one foot out of (but also one foot in) the conventional Democratic mainstream. It’s true that the McCain campaign has not effectively made this point. Yet my Corner colleague Andy McCarthy has eloquently complained about that. The most important point is what Obama’s many radical political partnerships reveal about his overall perspective, and how his radicalism ties in to, and helps explain, even his more conventional-seeming Democratic liberalism. I have written extensively about all of this.

This class of stuff, you'll note, comes from people who argue that a 3% increase in the income tax rate for people making over $250K is "Marxism" and anyone who says otherwise is a Red. This is what makes the "Bill Ayers" stuff so bizarre. By Corner standards, Marxism starts at, well, Ben Bernanke. Stanley Kurtz thinks "conventional-seeming Democratic liberalism" IS "radical politics."

These are people who say, in public, that the MSM's (or Ben Smith's) refusal to grill Barack Obama on why he is hiding his desire to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat is prima facie evidence of Bias. Shazam!

The joke, of course, is that over the past three decades the "MSM" have proven amazingly sensitive to tripe like this and have bent over backwards to accomodate the concerns of those purveying such  whines. And then they wonder why they're not taken seriously....

The Corner is a porn site for the resentfully ill-educated.

Got My Notebooks

I do not propose to respond to every academic paper where I am not discussed. However I suppose I should say something about the academic papers where I am not discussed by name. (And here.) (For the record SEK & I did talk about this briefly before the paper was given & I have no problem with his characterization of my, uh, distinctive online idiom.)

I've taken the title of this panel–"Blogging and the Academy"–a little literally, but I’ve heard and delivered a number of talks about the role of blogging in the academy–about its intellectual utility and its community-building potential–but haven’t heard much discussion about what impact, if any, the public presence of academics has had on the general level of online discourse. With that in mind, here are the two types of academic bloggers I won’t be discussing here today: the first is best embodied by former UCI economist Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, whose blog Eschaton is, by any of the various unreliable measures of online popularity—links, hits, page views, &c.—one of the most powerful voices out there; the second comes in the form of Thers, the pseudonymous proprieter of Whiskey Fire and an English professor at a small liberal arts college.

Duncan Black I’m avoiding because at this point, Eschaton is little more than a link-aggregator, with his longest recent post logging in at a robust 94 words; Thers I’m avoiding because he deliberately lives up to his namesake, Thersites, and as such is blunt, surly, and coarse; the verbal equivalent of Homer’s powerfully ugly hunchback whose satirical mode is, as Laurence Sterne noted, “of a pelting kind . . . as black as the very ink ’tis wrote with.”  Which is only to say, he responds to people like Jonah Goldberg with deserved venom.

Personally, I don't think I'm an academic blogger, but more an academic who happens to blog. I have an area of something like academic expertise, but it is only very rarely directly relevant to anything I talk about here. And that kind of matters; despite certain accusations to the contrary I have never (at least consciously) invoked my credentials in Blog-o-land, for a number of reasons, but the chief of these is that I could never see the relevance to what I'm saying online, and still can't, as it happens. On a more nitpicky level I teach at a community college, not a liberal arts college, and can be remarkably winsome on occasion. I also don't think Eschaton is just an aggregator, for reasons mentioned in SEK's comments and also because Atrios nowadays is all about telling people who live in the suburbs and own cars that they are horrible déclassé nerds. I find this terribly louche myself but what can you do.

But that's trivia. I will merely restate that I decided to say "fuck" a lot on the Internets because I agreed with Pierre Bourdieu that those who are excluded from the Official Discourse are "condemned to a shocking outspokenness." I'm not entirely sure I was right in all particulars, but I bet I had a hell of a lot more fun than a lot of people.

The new sheriff's a (DING!)

By Jake T. Snake

Molly was kind enough recently to share a heartwarming story with me relayed to her by two dedicated volunteers going door to door to get out the vote. The lady of the house answered the door and was cordial to the campaign workers. When they asked her who she thought she would vote for in the upcoming presidential elections she yelled back in to her husband to inquire who they were voting for. This piece alone intrigues me as I cannot imagine my spouse ever deferring to me in this manner, nor do I think she should just for the record. At any rate, the reply came immediately from within, "We're voting for the nigger". The woman unfazed by this answer repeated it to the campaign workers "We're voting for the nigger".  (I pause here for dramatic effect...where to begin parsing this oddity.)

To begin with, I am shocked that the woman used the same language as her husband, apparently without any sort of embarrasment. My spouse, a much more cultivated person than myself, spends a large portion of her life covering my lack of social graces and attempting to refine the few I have. It also strikes one as odd that folks who would choose this particular descriptor of our fellow African-American  citizens would also think it prudent to vote for Obama for president. The two behaviors seem at odds and represent to me the reason I find joy in going to work every day with people. They can always suprise you. The possibilities are never less than infinite. I am heartened by the prospect of individuals with enough insight to recognize that despite their own feelings about race, Obama could serve their interests. This is progress in some fashion. As opposed to the working/middle class folks voting republican, because of issues such as abortion, while many republican policies are decimating them economically.

Like many people this election season, I am curious to see if race is a barrier that can be cleared as Catholicism was in the 1960 election. Racism is as American as apple-pie. When I teach social work classes and we talk about race I begin the class by telling students that they must accept as fact that they are racists. This is not to imply that I think they are members of the Klu Klux Klan, skinheads or the like, but rather that racism is in the air and the water. We are all racist, it is merely a matter of degree. If you are a member of this culture you are a racist, because it could not be otherwise. I include myself in this indictment and believe that willingly acknowledging this is the only way to be conscious of our shared beliefs and begin questioning them. This piece by Kristof in the Times discusses the sort of subtle racism that I fear may have an impact in this election. Many people will give in to a gut level discomfort they feel about Obama as a candidate that they may not even be able to explain to themselves. How can we know in these circumstances if we are responding to the color of a man's skin or if we are really voting against him because we believe he wants to take our rifles away? We don't ...which is why I suppose the whole question intrigues me.

It is both sad and amusing to watch the right contort itself to both deny that it is racist all the while  searching for racial proxies to fling at Obama i.e. he is muslim, he hates his white grandmother, he hangs out with black revolutionaries. I will be voting for Obama in part, because he wants to dialogue with african-american revolutionaries, white working class men and leaders of countries with a different world view. The 8 long years of ignoring those who thought differently has not worked well. As the country and the world grow closer together and more interdependent we need someone as our leader whose default setting for problem solving doesn't involve the military. Virtually no one wants to waste the resources and the lives those endeavors cost anymore. We need someone whose experience extends beyond prep schools and the sheltered world of old money.

This understanding of others is not an intellectual exercise, it involves a dialogue and some discomfort. I reflect upon the places in my own life where I really learned something about those who were different from myself and it was never in a classroom. It was sharing a room in the military with an african-american man from New Jersey and a Samoan man. It was clients early in my career who were brave and kind enough to let me know where my approach was condescending and operating on faulty assumptions. It is the continuing feedback from my coworkers about how we can make our agency more diverse and inclusive.We can only come together as a country and a world by having these discussions and questioning whether the things we hold as true really are.

If you have an interest in exploring your own biases as regards the 2008 election cycle go to Project Implicit to take a test that can help reveal some of your own unconscious biases.

(N.B.: Anecdote above sourced here -- Thers)

Your Right Wing Intelligentsia

Pretty much all you need to know about why the GOP is losing this election is to be found in the high-fiving among "conservatives" about this interview where a ridiculous local TV host from Orlando asks Joe Biden completely asinine leading wingnut questions about why Barack Obama is just like Karl Marx. Biden came across like a grownup; the interviewer looked like, well, someone from the Onion News Network, only not funny and all too real.

But at least now we can see what in Greater Wingnuttia might be considered a media performance without "liberal bias." I've always sort of wondered about that, and now I know. And holy shit am I ever edified. Got edification out my ass right about now. Blech.

Bonus points for Red State dead ender Moe Lane, sho is still snarking away absurdly while feebly posturing as a Feminist Champion:

And, lastly: "I don't know who's writing your questions..." What a charming attempt to diminish a reporter who dared ask you questions that you didn't want to answer. And, just out of curiosity: would you have said that to a man?

If Mr Lane were stuck in that Berlin bunker so long ago he'd be making fun of Churchill's weight and Stalin's moustache right up to the final moment when he swallowed the poison.

Champions Officially

If "my brain is not ruled by political correctness" does not become an Internet tradition, I shall be very much disappointed.

I would like to congratulate Andy McCarthy for the most entertaining thing I have read on the Internet since Lee Siegel said his goodbyes. Glenn Danzig getting punched out is good -- this, is great.

The Pig-Nosed Parade

It looks like the years of the Republican Ascendancy are perhaps ending. And they are ending as anyone with sense could have predicted -- with mounds of corpses abroad and a destroyed economy at home. And now certain scenes from these dark years flicker past in my mind's eye, a tumult of images: "monstrous familiar images," as they say. Here's the first of them:

This is of course the "Brooks Brothers Riot," from the Florida recount debacle, when vicious young GOP geekapparatchiks from DC were flown down to disrupt by violence the operations of an election board. For all its nerdiness, this was indeed an instance of actual, real-life fascism -- systematized extra-legal violence used to attain political ends and the ordinary processes of democratic government be damned. Oddly enough a certain "scholar" of fascism in American political neglected to include an account of this episode in his comprehensive tome, though, you know, by any rational standard these Brooks Brothers suit-shirts are brown.

Charmingly, the WaPo tells us that these nasty little shits like to brag about their participation in this nasty little affair on their resumes. That alone tells you everything you need to know about the 21st century GOP --not only its ugliness, but its spectacular incompetence. It is no surprise that people with brazen contempt for democratic government don't have the slightest clue how to run one. Brooks Brothers riots, blood on the floor:

Certain consequences are inevitably inscribed in the logic of certain origins.

In the decades to come

by flory

Ambinder thinks Palin is the natural frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Think ahead to 2010...2011...2012.

Palin is ambitious. Very ambitious.

And if she wants the job, she's easily the frontrunner to become THE voice of the angry Right in the Wilderness.  She is a favorite of talk radio and Fox News conservatives, and speaks their language as only a true member of the club can.

Jeez, can we get through Nov 4 first?

No question Palin is ambitious, and, as Ambinder points out:

Palin is an enormously talented politician.  When she knows what she's talking about, or even when she knows enough to fake it, she is very, very appealing, and very good at redirecting questions to whatever her message is.

The key phrase there is "when she knows what she's talking about". She comes across as a skillful politician to Alaskans because she grew up there and has a firm grasp of the issues that matter to them. So she doesn't have to fumble around repeating the question or the questioner's name just to run out the clock.

But does that translate to political prowess on a national level? Ambinder thinks she's got plenty of time to become fluent on national issues. But that presupposes some degree of curiosity about national issues. A woman who reached her mid-40s without ever having left the United States doesn't strike me as overly invested in matters beyond the quotidian. And we've now had an eight year demonstration of just how little the intellectually incurious can absorb about national policy, even when wading knee deep in it.

Personally, I think Palin's future depends on who wins the war for control of the GOP. Wingnuts may very well come to dominate the nominating process. But they don't have the money. And I don't see her appealing to those who do. She's become a late-night punchline -- Dan Quayle for the 21st century -- who turns off independents and swing voters. She might be able to win a nomination, but she can't win a general election.  Corporate Republican interests aren't going to throw their money away on a sure loser.

So here's my completely-out-of-my-ass prediction for Caribou Barbie's future:

She pulls a reverse-McCain.

She dumps the first dude and hooks up with some rich wingnut who can finance her political future. She may even move to Oklahoma or Alabama or some other wingnut friendly state. Then she runs for the Senate in 2010 to keep her name and face in the national spotlight. In 2018 or thereabouts she goes for the gold. She'd still be in her mid-fifties.