Whiskey Fire

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Things I should not read before I go to bed.

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Won't have time for days to get to this, but... holy shit.

Really?

The MSM wants to make Netanyahu look like Hitler!

This, even after Netanyahu went out of his way to come across as serious and profound through the deployment of not-ridiculous iconography.

Here is a Hot One.

There were also positive reactions. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said in a statement "I join in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s call for a Middle East of progress and peace. And I join his urgent call to prevent the gravest threat to that vision — a nuclear-armed Iran. I, like the rest of the American people, applaud the bravery of the people of Israel and stand with them in these dangerous times. The designs of the Iranian regime are a threat to America, Israel, and our friends and allies around the world.”

Sure.

And while we're on the subject, to speak to this:

This.

Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer praised in his Twitter account Netanyahu's use of the cartoonish bomb as "one of the most effective, gripping, uses of a chart I've ever seen. Is the world listening??"

A Romney foreign policy would be... well, as bad as Obama's is, worse than that.

 

King of the Dipshits

Gosh.

Romney has cornered the "libertarian vote."

And if that were a thing that matters, that would be a thing that matters.

When the Whistle Blows, Dogs Bark

That's how it works!

Ann Althouse, of course, is the enlighteningest.

Someone in blackface "grinning widely as he is about to chomp into a watermelon" is himself playing the role of a black person. This black character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward black people. The black person is his hero for enjoying an excellent source of Vitamin C.

Oh wait, oopsie. Botched that quote.

Someone like Andrew Dice Clay making "limp wristed" gestures is himself playing the role of a gay person. This gay character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility towards gay people. The gay person is his hero for having such wonderful dextrousness.

Dammit! Goofed that again. Let's give it another go.

Someone putting on comically buck teeth, scrunching his eyelids together and "pronouncing the leter l like the letter r" is himself playing the role of an Oriental. This Oriental character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility towards Oriental people. The Oriental person is his hero for cooking such delicious rice.

What on Earth is the problem here. Another stab at it....

Someone making a "big tits joke" in regards to a woman's hireabilty is himself playing the role of a sexist. This sexist character making a sexist joke can't be read as making a sexist joke because of Ann Althouse's idiotic double standards. Ann Althouse is her own hero for calling other people bigots based on nothing but featherbrained malice whenever it suits her and squawking about her personal victimization at other times depending on whatever feeds her ego at any particular moment. (Her whole fucking blog as a cite for that last bit.)

Wait, fixed the bug! Here's what she actually said:

Someone doing the “tomahawk chop” is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can’t be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero.

Oh well that's sensible.

Women Academics Face Sexism! Who Knew!

A long time ago, I invented the phrase Malibu Barbiearianism. That deserves to be remembered, almost as much as does the fact that higher education is in too many ways even now too fucking sexist.

MAS. This anecdote from the past is absolutely true:

A woman I know quite well, ahem, was once told as a bit of well-intended advice that it would be a good idea not to be seen on campus so often with her children, as this might be held against her if she ever were to apply for a full time job in the department where she was adjuncting. The amazing bit about this advice was that her husband was at the time a full-time professor at that very college -- and since this couple's kids went to daycare on campus, and he was the one who ended up taking them to and from that daycare, he could be seen almost daily dragging some red-cheeked squalling brat around with him. And you know what? He was routinely praised for his obvious joy at being a family man and a good Daddy and so good with his adorable little progeny.

Go figure...

Good times.

Kicker of Elves

Ann Althouse is all a-squawk about a Paul Krugman blog post about which she is experiencing hallucinations.

A NYT headline: "Mitt Romney Says, 'I Am The Confidence Fairy!''"

The usual featherbrained bad-faith maundering commences instanter.

But Romney never said "I Am The Confidence Fairy!" There's some other Romney quote — some dull thing about economics — and then Paul Krugman says: "In effect, Romney was saying, 'I am the confidence fairy!'"

Krugman really, really wants Romney to lose. So, presumably, does the NYT. I don't have a problem with an opinion writer paraphrasing somebody's quote like that. It's the use of quotation marks in the headline that's wrong.

It is Wrong to put a paraphrase in quotation marks! Gosh!

This is an Ancient Rule that Ann Althouse just made up and that makes no grammatical or ethical sense -- unless you are a hopeless crap-for-brains of the sort that marinates in the Althouse comments cesspit, an individual of cloacal intelligence capable of believing that Krugman is trying to make Times readers think that Romney literally said "I am the confidence fairy."

As is usual with Miss Havisham of Franzia House, it gets disingenuouser and disingenuouser.

And the use of the word "fairy" demands some attention. I understand that Krugman is using the word in the sense of the tooth fairy — a magical creature. But the word is also a homophobic epithet. If a Republican had used equivalent language against a Democrat, we would hear criticism....

Replacement-ref-standard flag throwing: hypothetical gay-baiting, 10 yards. Never mind the irrelevance, here's the bollocks.

so let me provide the criticism in this turnabout.

Oh do.

And by the way, creating confidence isn't like changing a tooth into money. The supposedly fairy-like power Romney claimed was to inspire optimism about the economy.

Yes, and that was awfully stupid of him. In certain key parts of his post, Krugman even explains why.

Compare that to Obama's "this was the moment" speech, given at the point of accepting his party's nomination in 2008. At that moment, he proclaimed, "the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal... we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth... we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals."

If we're going to ridicule presidential candidates asserting magical — godlike — powers, that was the ultimate.

So? Obama's rhetoric from '08 has no bearing on whether or not Romney is talking out his ass in '12.

But also even in that Obama excerpt there are allusions to two acual policy goals, one to do with climate change and the other to do with foreign policy. And, well, Obama's EPA is superior to what Romney would belch, and we're mostly not in Iraq. These are real things that have happened. And on the other hand there was not literally morning in America, and also a thousand points of light was a metaphor. In Shocking News, during political campaigns, rhetoric happens.

But there is no policy nothing in Romney's non-answer.

Althouse bounces on, high on the sort of self-confidence exuded by people who don't know and don't care what they're yelling about.

Now, Krugman thinks he has a very funny point about economics, which is that the stock market is up, even though Romney's looking less likely to win according to Intrade....

We're deprived of the text of the question he's responding to. But we can see that Romney inserts a qualification about "which markets you’re talking about, which types of commodities," before moving on to a generic statement about "optimism about the future" and "a boost in the economy." I'm not a Nobel-prize winning economist, but I can see that Romney is making a decision not to get into saying something complicated, and that there are different types of markets and some go up when others go down. But if you want to talk about the stock market, isn't that where people put extra money that they aren't investing in expanding their own businesses in a way that might produce more commodities and increase employment?

That would be a profound rebuttal, perhaps, if the last sentence were not asinine, and had anything to do with Krugman's point.

Fairy forbid that the economics expert would actually explain some economics now and then.

He did. Not that "not having any economic policies will probably not improve the economy" is all that challenging an economic concept.

Why bother when there's one more thing about Romney that's supposedly soooo hilarious?

Because it's funny.

It seems we've all turned into idiots.... here in this remade great nation that reflects our very best selves.

An idiot who has refused the invitation to not be an idiot remains an idiot, idiot.

And then there is Althouse's comments, which is less nutpicking than it is bobbing for turdmangoes. Feel free...

The Funny Thing About Southern Secession

So I was reading the Wonkettes (another place where I write words occasionally) and saw this review of a book about the idea of Southern secession, written by a Northwestern liberal armpit-ty hippie (I assume), which makes the argument that really, the rest of the country would probably be better off if we just gave the South back to wherever we got it from (hell). 

Now, I am new around here, but if you don't know yet, I am a goddamned Southerner. Born in Arkansas (I am indeed known among the gays in my town as one of an amazing yet unorganized group of guys who are The Best Guys in town, known as the Arkansas Boys), raised in Tennessee, lived in Georgia, back in Tennessee, etc. I love it down here. That being said, I see books like this and my immediate reaction is "oh yeah, hell yes, fucking get rid of the South. Turn it into the Banana Republic it so aspires to be. Just let me move North first." And it's weird, because as I was reading that book review, it occurred to me that a lot of Southern progressives are like this. 

We are well fucking aware that so much of the history that has defined this nation happened on our lands. We feel it all the way back to the Native peoples who were driven/murdered out of their rightful territory, where we pay homage to them by giving our wealthy white neighborhoods names like "Chickasaw Gardens." We who are obsessed with music know how much of our musical heritage comes from this place. We know what kind of magic comes from this part of the country. But at the same time, we deal with the fact that, as the book review describes, this part of the country has been the Grown-Up part of the country's proverbial bleeding, abscessed hemmorhoid pretty much since the nation's founding. We love it, yet we hate it. We cherish being Southern Liberals (Molly Ivins, helloooo.), yet there's a part of us that's right there with the rest of the country saying "Kick it into the Gulf of Mexico. All of it. No one will miss it." 

It's a weird dichotomy, is all I'm saying.

Evil and Nonsense

I have a special place in my heart for Catholic apologies for vicious, brainless autoritarianism. I call that special place in my heart my "fuck you place."

Aggressive humanism was once thought to be a primarily European malady.

By whom? The Irish? Spanish? Italians? Polish? What the hell? Oh wait, a sympathetic Canadian said something congenial, so history meh.

Then it migrated to Canada. Now it has become a serious problem in American public life.

KILL THE MULLET! All right then! Wait....

Taylor’s “exclusive humanism” is not the benign secularity—the separation of religious and political institutions in a modern society—that Pope Benedict XVI has praised for helping Catholicism develop its understanding of the right relationship between Church and state. No, by referring to “exclusive humanism,” Charles Taylor was raising a warning flag about an aggressive and hegemonic cast of mind that seeks to drive out of the public square any consideration of what God or the moral law might require of a just society.

As a counterpoint, 20th century Irish history.

I'm not feeling especially nice right now. The Catholic Church, if it were what it sold itself as, and sells itself as, could have wrought all the wonders it promised, and promises, in Ireland post 1922.

They wrought a nightmare.

We know what happens to a nation when the Catholic Church gets all it wants.

Never. Again.

On both of these fronts—the political-legal front, and the social-cultural front—the Catholic Church is under assault in the United States today. Over the past four years, the federal government has made unprecedented efforts to erode religious freedom. The gravest assault was the “contraceptive mandate” issued earlier this year by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: an offense to conscientious Catholic employers who believe what the Church believes about the morality of human love and the ethics of the right to life, and a frontal attack on the institutional integrity of the Church. For with the HHS mandate, the federal government seeks nothing less than to turn the Catholic Church’s charitable and medical facilities into state agencies that facilitate practices the Catholic Church believes are gravely evil.

Bullshit. And grotsque bullshit as well: fuck the consciences of "employers." You pay for insurance, you get insurance. The Church is free to try persuade even Catholics to stop fucking.

If they believed in their moral authority, they would not be so grasping and pathetic about getting laws passed, and would be less whiny about how nobody listens to them except for Matt Drudge. All the other Catholics are fucking. Except for the closeted gay Catholics, who thank Christ are keeping church music alive.

Previously Viewed Movies

The American Jewish vote has long been overwhelmingly Democratic, and that won't stop -- but neither will stuff like this...

Poll shows Jewish support for Obama in Florida down 7 percentage points from 2008

... ever stop getting wanked over by clots like this, who console themselves with happy thoughts about how Orthodox Jews are way into fucking.

Not sure why the right thinks that the American public really wants to see an even more hardcore aggressive Israel that leads the US president by the nose. But then again this is the American right, so we're talking dogma, not sense.

Strictly Comedy

Assrocket.

A lot of politicians are dishonest, but Barack Obama may be in a league by himself. He appeared on the David Letterman show last night, and Letterman asked him about the national debt (somewhat surprisingly). Obama’s answer was a masterpiece of prevarication.

Gosh.

He described how the debt originated, and claimed, falsely, that he inherited a $1 trillion deficit. In fact, this country had never run a deficit anywhere near $1 trillion until FY 2009, the first year of the Obama administration.

And now we finally know that Assrocket is not just an asshole, but pig-ignorant! Whoever woulda guessed!