Whiskey Fire

Is It Over Yet?

I am proudly pro-choice, so I proudly chose to not waste a fucking second watching that mercifully just-ended abortion in Tampa. I've gone unblinking into some odd corners of Greater Wingnuttia in my day, but fuck that noise.

Willard isn't even a wingnut, is the thing; he is just desperate to play wingnut to become president, a position he wants because... it's shiny? I have no idea, but listening to Willard is like watching your small town's Most Ambitious Middle-Aged Married Dentist hit on the 18-Year-Old Queen of the Pumpkin Pageant.

Clint Eastwood, though....

Well, maybe he's sufficiently respected that the obvious vicious parodies will be blunted, but... they shouldn't be. I saw the You Tubery of that, and I cringed. But I cringed, you cringed, we should all cringe for Romney!

A snarling incoherent formerly impressive white man.

Eh. It plays to a certain demographic, I suppose.

Politics and Pics

I. POLITICAL POST POLITICAL POST POLITICAL POST

This is my comment on Bill Keller's blog yesterday. (As yet, unpublished.)

The war with Iraq was much more than a blunder, and the Bush Administration did not stumble into it blindly.

On January 26, 1998, the Project for the New American Century sent a letter to President Clinton urging regime change in Iraq¹. Many of the signatories would later become G. W. Bush Administration members, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary of State John Bolton.

According to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush Administration was planning on invading Iraq well before 9-11². But it was 9-11 and the climate of fear that followed that provided the opportunity to push the nation in war.

They were not alone in this effort, Bill Keller. The New York Times and the Washington Post were crucial in helping peddle Administration lies about Iraq. And while Judy Miller was dismissed for her role in the Scooter Libby affair, her co-author on many of the Iraq stories, Michael Gordon, remains on the New York Times staff (as do "pundits" such as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks)³.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

- George Santayana

¹ PNAC letter, January 26, 1998

² Bush Sought 'Way' To Invade Iraq

³ Now They Tell Us by Michael Massing

/ POLITICAL POST POLITICAL POST POLITICAL POST POLITICAL POST

II. Salute to ZEGS

The Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver gave a speech last night. Commentary from my blog fiends: here and here.

There are the songs on his iPod which I’ve heard on the campaign bus -- and on many hotel elevators. He actually urged me to play some of these songs at campaign rallies. I said, ‘I hope it’s not a deal-breaker Mitt, but my playlist starts with AC/DC and ends with Zeppelin.’

- Paul Ryan

ZEGS and Drugs and Rock and Roll

III. Thanks for stopping by! Here are some pics.

UPDATE: ZEGS reacts to Clint Eastwood's performance this evening.

(Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)

~

Isn't It Interesting? Isn't It Nice?

I am startled and frightened to learn that there exist human souls who of their own volition are watching the Republican Convention.

I frankly find Mittnuttery far creepier than Standard Wingnuttery. Your W-era wingnut wanted to start stupid wars and fellate the rich. Your Modern Mittnut wants to start stupid wars, fellate the rich, and then hard-sell you a timeshare in Provo.

Anyway, Jonah Goldberg is a shit.

No, really.

Unfortunately, the claim that Romney is trafficking in racism has proliferated. His ads attacking Obama for unwinding the 1996 welfare reform are being denounced as not simply inaccurate but racially loaded.

For instance, in a piece titled "Making the Election About Race," Columbia University journalism professor Thomas Edsall writes, "The racial overtones of Romney's welfare ads are relatively explicit" -- an interesting analysis given that the ads explicitly don't mention race, which you'd expect to be a minimum requirement of "explicit" racial overtones.

If the ad don't say "nigger," it ain't pulled da "trigger."

!

For fuck's sake. Really? Really?

Moving on.

Christ this is ghastly...

However, Edsall concedes that the racial overtones of Romney's Medicare ads are "a bit more subtle." Those ads charge that Obama raided Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Then Edsall notes that Medicare recipients are "overwhelmingly white."

He conveniently leaves out the fact that American seniors are overwhelmingly white as well and, if anything, under-enrolled in Medicare.

First, Romney's Medicare ads are all lies. (Really? You need links?)

Second, how on earth... what? What Jonah Goldberg said isn't a rebuttal. It's kind of evidence for the other side's point, if anything... what?

Here in Tampa, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told BuzzFeed that the Democrats are playing "the race card" in order to gin up black turnout. I'm sure that's true, but they're also trying to transform Romney into the ultimate unacceptable other in American politics -- a bigot (and a Mormon one to boot).

Gosh. The GOP sure has transcended racism.

"Here in Tampa, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told BuzzFeed that the Democrats are playing 'the race card' in order to gin up black turnout."

Jonah Goldberg quite seriously wrote this sentence to prove that liberals are the real racists, while at the same time, we see the GOP engaging in blatantly racist voter suppression efforts.

Face it, you're racist, all that's missing is the white sheets.

Ellen Barkin, Rocks

The business of Michelle Malkin's "Twitchy" is Flying Monkey Business. Say something on Twitter that offends the Screechy Schmuck of the Right, and a half-thousand semiliterates are dispatched to howl angry nonsense at you like you were the Swiper who swiped their bananas.

Here.

Ferfucksake.

Ellen Barkin is totally right to devoutly wish via a retweet that a storm:

Wash every pro-life, anti-education, anti-woman, xenophobic, gay-bashing, racist SOB right into the ocean!

Even if she didn't say so, exactly, it were no crime to wish so.

No, she doesn't want anyone dead.

She wants to say FUCK YOU.

She should.

For it is just and right to say FUCK YOU YOU BIGOTS.

Fairly considered... fuckers have it coming.

Pretty rough luck for the fish, taken literally, but you can't have everything.

The quote is a retweet: and it counts as a bird-flip.

Flipping the bird is goddamn American. And the Twitchy flying monkery is point-scoring civility-wanking, which is a term I am amazed to discover I didn't invent eight years ago, but which strikes me as analytically useful....

Anti-choice, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-teacher, anti-immigrant fuckers are fuckers. If they want to have a More Civil Dialogue, they are free to ask nicely for one. They have my email address. More to the point, they can stop race gender gay red-baiting annnytime it stops working for them at the ballot box.

So let's beat them at the ballot box.

And let's also tell them to fuck off.

And let's not apologize to the little shits for hurting the nasty little pretend feelings they fake having for Point-Scoring Purposes.

Fuck you, Michelle Malkin, you malevolent shitkicking dinglefraud pissnose ass-twerp hatemonger bigot.

(Ellen Barkin has long been one of my Hollywood crushes. Full disclosure, I guess. MollyI can do this look too, when she wants to.

 

 

A smart proud imperfect woman with a "fuck you" glint, a sense of humor, and a sense of herself. Hot.)

Oh and levity.

Subspace Twatwaffles

This is glorious.

You have probably read dozens of analyses in the last 3 years trying to explain what happened, who’s to blame, and how President Obama’s policies have helped or hurt our economic situation. The fact that academically speaking, there is a divergence of opinion about all of those things makes assessing Obama’s role in the continued jobs recession a matter of opinion. Some believe he helped avoid a much deeper recession or even depression. Others point to his radical overhaul of healthcare and massive new regulatory schemes as creating an uncertain business climate that discourages job creation.

To highlight:

The fact that academically speaking, there is a divergence of opinion about all of those things makes assessing Obama’s role in the continued jobs recession a matter of opinion.

There is no spoon. There is no math. You know kung-fu.

One thing should not be a matter of opinion: The lack of focus on jobs by this administration. Obama’s solution has been to throw money at the problem, including the astonishing notion that expanding unemployment benefits out to 100 weeks is a stimulus for the economy.

Uh, it obviously is.

Regardless, the GOP has passed several of the president’s “jobs” initiatives that have had no effect whatsoever on the employment situation.

No the GOP fucking hasn't, and fuck you five times on a fucksicle for a fucking fucked-up-straight-up lie. Name one.

As MollyI would say, Rick Moran, thy name is "twatwaffle."

 

Failed "Musician" Seeks to Bolster Failing Vice-Presidential Candidate

Years ago, when I was working in radio, we were doing a remote at a bar full of frat boys and their unlikely conquests. Todd Akin wasn't around then, as I'm sure he could have offered up a few strategies. Any-hoo, the grand prize that night was two tickets and a limo ride to see Kid Rock in Nashville, a few hours away. People participated, but no one's heart was really in it, including the radio station employees. Toward the end, we reached toward the "vault" and found other things for which people could compete. On the list were two front row tickets for 311 in our own town. 

A southern sorority girl, whose name I am quite sure was Baylee, Haylee or Kaylee, jumped up, and in all her drunken glory, screamed, "Kid Rock is a faggot! But I'll go in for this!"*

My point being. Uh, nobody who ever actually was any part of any zeitgeist ever gave a flying fuck about Kid Rock. Not even Baylees at Southern colleges majoring in god knows what, and not even their male counterparts who, really, honestly, were much more concerned about going to see Widespread Panic for the 98th time. Which is why this is so pathetic:

PONTIAC, Mich. – Kid Rock, who will play at the GOP convention in Tampa and is the artist behind Mitt Romney's campaign song "Born Free," made an appearance at Paul Ryan's fundraiser here in Michigan Friday.

According to a pool report, Kid Rock – whose real name is Robert Ritchie – introduced Ryan at the fundraiser, held at the Oakland Hills Country Club.

“I was going to be a little weisenheimer and say, ‘Which one is running for vice president?'" Kid Rock told attendees. “Then they would introduce Paul and I would walk out and say hello.''

That didn't happen.  Upon taking the stage, Ryan remarked, “So one of us is running for vice president, but only one of us was listening to ‘Bawitdaba’  in the motorcade on the way over here.”

Uh.

(That’s a reference to one of Kid Rock’s biggest hits.)

Thank you for clarifying, because I didn't know what the fuck, and I'm only 32, so it's not like I'm completely out of the loop.

I'm also fascinated to know that Kid Rock's "jokesies" line involved the word "weisenheimer." Did he also say "kids these days" and "fiddlesticks!?" I totally get that they're working solely for the Hoveround vote, but goodness.

Keep up with the "trying to be cool" thing, though GOP. You've got Kid Rock! We've got...well, all real artists. Yeah.

*Oh, and don't get all bitchy about the sorority person using the word "faggot." If I, a faggot, do not care, you should not. 

They Cling to the Cinema, But Can't Find Security

Roger L. Simon, who is best remembered for nobody remembering him, is going to the GOP convention, an experience that he is documenting because History Demands It. (History: "who was that douche again? That glib fucker who tried to make money off liberals not liking him anymore because at dinner parties after 9/11, he threw canapes at the capital gains tax?")

Simon expostulates on the Coming Conservative Cinema Renaissaince, in which all of America is swept up in rapturous joy at the prospect of more and more and more fringe wingnut conspira-docs (that's an old genre), all of which make BILLIONS OF BOX OFFICE DOLLARS.

Dinesh D’Souza’s movie on Obama, 2016, continues to perform at the box office and hot on its heels another Obamadoc (is that a new genre?) from David Bossie’s Citizen’s United – The Hope and The Change – is opening at the convention. From what I’ve seen of the Bossie film, it also promises to be good.

So this may be the convention of the conservative filmmaker, of all things. Arrivederci, Michael Moore. In the era of Michelle Obama’s tedious fitness campaigns he does seem even more passé. Perhaps Bloomberg will ban Moore’s films in New York until he loses seventy-five pounds or promises never to drink a fourteen-ounce soda again. (NOTE to Harvey Weinstein: Slimming is in, Moore is out.)

Is this the beginning of a trend? Will conservative films now start to spew forth from Hollywood where the bottom line still, on rare occasions, trumps political pretentiousness? You never know. But if Romney wins, look for at least a slightly different product from Tinseltown. They do have stockholders, you know.

Gosh.

A few points.

Michael Moore never had a film "opening" at a Democratic convention. Moore is, whatever else he is, an independent filmmaker.

For myself, I admire a lot of what Moore has done as a filmmaker, am indifferent to some other stuff he's done as a fimmaker, and think some percentage of what he's done as a filmmaker has sucked ass. Also I agree with him on a lot of his overt and implied politics, and in a lot of other respects, think he's wrong.

Whatever -- he's certainly not a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.  Moore is rather a free-market success. No party political support required!

Of course, however, as Simon astutely observes, Moore is fat, so he is wrong, and Michelle Obama is a nagging bitch. So nyah. (This all is known as "civil discourse.")

But then again the free market has made "2016" a huge success, too, because, well, did this lose money?

D'Souza is not a filmmaker so much as a "crazy person."

And I am going to end this with the conclusion of the review of "2016" from the libertarian geniuses at Reason:

But the job of a film is not to have a consistently logical argument. It is to make that argument persuasively, and 2016 does so with emotional and narrative power.

Jesus Fucking Christ. A libertarian is someone who gets so smug after reading Animal Farm that they proudly twirl their corkscrew tails out in public.

Just Can't Deal W/ Politics

Therefore, a photo of a more-or-less-life-sized metal giraffe. — M. Bouffant

Portable Men's Society

It is easy to forget that Our Right-Wing Friends are so very exceedingly butch.

Fortunately, they feel compelled to incessantly remind us that they are, indeed, butch.

Otherwise, we might just forget and start to consider them feeble nincompoops.

THIS IS BUTCH!

It’s not much consolation, but the Norway mass murderer (whose name, like the names the Sikh temple shooter or Gabby Giffords’s shooter or the Batman shooter, should be repeated as little as possible, since public exposure is what they crave) will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, since Norway apparently has “preventive detention” after a sentence has been completed. Though, of course, “the rest of his life” should last only until the authorities finish preparing the gas chamber or the gallows....

The absurd sentence did not stem from the fact that Norway “evaluate[s] its own immigrant children’s lost lives as being worth so very, very little.” Rather, Norway, like the rest of the developed world, has become so decadent that it can no longer take the vigorous measures any society needs to defend itself. A self-confident society that wasn’t apologizing for its ancestors and guilty about it success would, in an orderly, law-based fashion, put this fiend to death. He’s laughing all the way to the jailhouse.

Smell the balls.

Anyhow, so right. There is a persuasive reason why Norway experiences horrific, insane episodes of mass killing only once every third generation, why we here in the USA are masculine enough to deal with mass shootings fucking weekly: they are decadent, we are butch.

We shoot, we score!

Likewise, Our Butchest State, Texas, has been so damn successful in emphasizing to any crazy murderous bastard that if they even dare to do any crazy murders in Texas, Texas will murder them. That is why Texas has only used the death penalty once -- after that, the crooks were all a-scairt!

Fuck.

 

Two Redheads, One Cupp

Due to my husband's new work schedule he is often home at odd times during the day, affording him the opportunity to watch daytime TV. Since I usually have MSNBC on, he is now aware of the mostly silly but very occasionally interesting "The Cycle." Unfortunately, the show has piqued his interest, and not in a good way, forcing me to having a version of this conversation--I crap you not--at least 3 times: Husband: (In reference to S.E. Cupp) Who the hell is this?

Me: S.E. Cupp.  

Husband: She's a moron.

Me: I know.

Husband: Why is she on this show?

Me: Because she's young, attractive and conservative.

Husband: What are her credentials?

Me: Um, I'm not sure. She has this shtick where she's, like, the conservative atheist who hates other atheists.

Husband: *Leaves room looking like he smelled a fart.*

Yer killin' me, MSNBC. Listen, I get that you want your daytime programming to be filled with attractive young folks. And I'm mostly on-board with that. Hell, I voted for Krystal Ball, who while her parents clearly intended for to get a job cavorting around a pole and collecting singles in her g-string, is actually an intelligent, competent liberal voice. Surely you coulda done better than Sippy if you HAD to have a conservative on "The Cycle." Then again, if you're really committed to Sippy, you could always rename the show "The Tricycle."

 

--vacuumslayer