Whiskey Fire

How Can We Know the Scammers from the Scam?

I confess to being rather flummoxed, somewhat befuddled, by Breaking News such as this, which in this particular instance has gassily bubbled up from the shit-pit yclept Right-Wing News.

You can examine the particulars your own selves, but what it boils down to is an accusation that "grass-roots conservatives" are being ripped off by shady PACs who collect donations from the rubes, but then "line their own pockets" and don't spend any money on getting crazy far-right idiots elected.

Well, yeah, I guess that happens.

But the question is: so?

What conservative "media organization" isn't a scam?

I mean, holy shit, this is coming from Right-Wing News, one of dozens of pretty the exact same wingnut sites featuring the exact same gibberish from the exact same authors collecting checks for the exact same rubbish cant. The American Thinker? Townhall? Big Dead Breitbart? The Fuckulist? The Daily Crawler (half cuckoo political smears, half tit-gazing?). And The Grand-daddy, the ghastly NewsMax (which is straight-up a platform for fraud*)?

None of these places, nor their smelly likenesses, commits anything like journalism, or do anything other than feed the mindless maw of outraged anger that is Conservatism and the garbage-demons who get paid to stoke the hate.

Cite: John Fucking Hawkins' own fucking article:

Additionally, for those of us who have a lot of friends in the Tea Party and among grassroots conservatives, stories of abuse have become rampant. That may be why you’ve heard people like Ann Coulter and Dana Loesch publicly suggesting that there are groups out there ripping people off.

I put that shit in boldfaced red because it is my point exactly.

Ann Coulter and Dana Loesch are bitching about how their rubes are getting gouged by other rubes.

That they may be nuts enough to be sincere is of no nohow.

In more Comedy Pile-on, here is someone else with the High Dudgeon about the Fleecing of the Lambs:

I’ve been saying for a while now that too many scammers and opportunists have been taking advantage of the Tea Party and conservative grassroots.

That's Jonah Goldberg, in a Corner post that is, surprisingly, not entitled "Hey! Them's MY Nachos!"

 

*Ladies & Gents, today's NewsMax sidebar. I rest my fucking case.

Paid in Circus Peanuts

Jonah Goldberg may not, as it happens, be intelligent. Here he engages in the classic rhetorical fallacy, argumentem wank neener.

Abortion-rights protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court building on Monday holding signs that read “Birth Control: Not My Boss’s Business.”

Much to their chagrin, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his ruling in the Hobby Lobby case.

It's a switcheroo!

Hobby Lobby never objected to covering birth control per se. It already covers 16 kinds of birth control for its employees. But it objected to paying for what it considers to be abortifacients, which don’t prevent a pregnancy but terminate one. The pro-abortion-rights lobby can argue that “abortion” and “birth control” are synonymous terms, but that doesn’t make it true.

Ear-elephant; the SC says it can so discriminate if it wants to. And the abortofasists stuff is stupid.

But here's the shit:

Similarly, the Hobby Lobby decision opens the door for closely held companies to deny coverage of all forms of birth control if they can plausibly argue that doing so would violate their conscience.

This is precisely the problem. The HL abortofascism argument is asinine. They didn't make a remotely plausible argument. They just burped "Jesus!"

What is hateful about this decision is that it boils down to "fuck you, we're rich and suddenly conveniently religious, so fuck you, law, science, medicine, democracy, humanity, women. And, in conclusion, fuck you."

Have another fucking circus peanut, Jonah Goldberg.

MAS. Yes, I bailed before I had to pay attention to the Game of Thrones cosplay. Needed more booze. Lord:

This gets us to why I think the ruling’s majority essentially agreed with the protesters. If I like to dress up as a character from Game of Thrones on weekends, pretending to fight snow zombies and treating my mutt like she’s a mystical direwolf, that’s none of my employer’s business. But if I ask my employer to pay for my trip to a Game of Thrones fan convention, I am asking him to make it his business. If my employer refuses, that may or may not be unfair, but it’s his right. If, in response, I go to the convention and have the government force my employer to pay for my travel, that only makes things worse. It not only makes my private pursuits my boss’s business, it makes them the business of taxpayers and a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington.

Fucking moron.

His "argument" is not worth bothering with, but to stress something I've not seen elsewhere stressed...

I'm married, you fucking asshole. My wife and I are grownups who do what grownups do when we make the kids go play outside. Sex with my wife isn't jokey fanfic or cosplay, it's being married and enjoying fucking.

Goldberg's anti-sex assumptions make me nuts. Fucking within marriage (!) is kind of a key ingredient to why MollyI&I are a long-term monogamous heterosexual couple. We like fucking each other. A lot. And we don't want a baby every time.

And we've had three kids! Jesus fuck! What more do you religious lunatics want? If you insist on a fucking employer-based health insurance system, pay for the fucking, uh, fucking.

By golly, it mystifies me how anyone could be such a sociopath that they could even remotely compare profoundly intimate, utterly human, deeply personal sexual issues with something as superficial as fantasy fiction role playing --

Wait. Check that.

Sorry, folks, false alarm, enjoy your meal.

Whoops, Forgot the Burper King

When last we cared, Erick Erickson had said the most asinine thing imaginable about the Arizona gay baker law idiocy.

But then, Jonah Goldberg!

I agree with my (openly gay and black) friend, columnist Deroy Murdock. He thinks private businesses should be allowed to serve whomever they want.

For fuck's sake...

The Fartiad

At Teh Korner Jonah Goldberg commences yet once more, ye fartles, with the traditional invocation of his Muse, Derpsichore.

A friend sent me a link to Cass Sunstein’s absolutely ridiculous column last week, but I didn’t have a chance to get to it.

Presumably this delay results from the sad fact that both hands were yet again lodged in Pringles cans of completely different flavors, making typing a Challenge.

And now The Weekly Standard and Walter Russell Mead have beaten me to the punch.

If there's one adjective commonly applied to Walter Russell Mead, it is "spry." Boring, boring... ok, here we go.

The notion that liberals were sympathetic to extreme left-wing views (of Marxist, Soviet, or national-socialist origin) hardly hangs on charges made by Whittaker Chambers. The Road to Serfdom made essentially this charge five years earlier, as did countless writers on what is sometimes called “the Old Right.” The charge wasn’t always that liberal fellow-travelers had a secret agenda. Hayek’s argument was more sophisticated than that, even in The Road to Serfdom (his least sophisticated book, if you ask me). Rather, part of the charge was that liberals were blind to the dangers of their own thinking. The very mainstream liberal urge to plan peoples’ lives for them (which Sunstein fully represents in his writing) is ill-equipped to stop at the edge of tyranny.

Hayek's "argument," while tripe, is surely relatively sophisticated, at least as concerns anyone so hopelessly befarted as to ask Jonah Goldberg what is and what ain't "sophisticated." Maybe Jonah's edition wasn't printed on jerky, so he had to add "sauce."

Because it's not that the Cass Sunstein article isn't fluff; it is!

It is that the enduring, and by now much-beloved American liberal innovation of the period, Social Security... is not tyranny.

I mean, it just isn't.

So, like, as far as observable, consensual reality goes... liberal retirement and healthcare plans clearly don't much resemble Soviet totalitarianism, and it is bugshit crazy to suggest otherwise...?

American Liberalism may just be -- as the experience of nearly a century attests -- about making Americans' lives better, and not at all about totalitarianism!

SHAZAM!

And maybe we have a democracy where people LIKE liberal programs, and you have to trick them into voting against them! But that never works! Because TOTALITARIANISM!

Jonah...?

It’s also odd that Sunstein has to go back more than a half century to gripe about this sort of thing, when every day leading Democrats, liberal writers — and the agitproppy network MSNBC — insist that the conservative agenda boils down to restoring Jim Crow, “white supremacy” (as Chris Matthews says on an almost-weekly basis), and even slavery.

Jonah? Sweetie? Honey-boo? If you don't like the racism charge, don't support voter repression.

Beyond that...

As I’ve been saying a lot lately, behind every double standard is a single standard. It’s not that liberals hate name-calling, it’s that they hate the idea that they can’t have a monopoly on the practice.

Heh. Sad racist anti-democracy fucknose is sad.

Hanging Curveload

Jonah Goldberg explains Civil Rights.

in the debate over gay marriage, one commentator after another likens arguments against same-sex marriage to arguments against interracial marriage. They said blacks and whites couldn't marry and now they say men and men can't marry!

Gosh.

But it's also ridiculous to equate Jim Crow prohibitions on interracial marriage to prohibitions on gay marriage.

Why?

If you can't see the problem, it's this: the whole point of the civil rights movement is that skin color is superficial. Sex -- i.e. male, female -- is actually a real and deep biological difference. You could look it up.

Jonah Goldberg provides no citations to support the notion that "skin color is superficial" was the message of the civil rights movement.

That would in fact have been a very strange thing for the civil rights leaders to have argued. "You are merely being arbitrary!" was oddly enough not a slogan in Selma.

Goldberg also doesn't explain why "sex" is a valid argument against same-sex marriage because biology.

If you get to the end of his babbling, you get this:

Slavery and Jim Crow were horrible injustices and the civil rights movement was a shining moral triumph. But the light of that movement shouldn't be used to blind us to important distinctions, chief among them: We don't live in that world anymore.

The black voters screwed by voter ID laws live there right fucking now.

 

Nobody Ever Actually Wanted to Talk to You, Frankly

Shorter Jonah Goldberg:

If the nation is to have to have an honest conversation about race, we first need to Solemnly Celebrate dimwit racists.

I'm Not Sure If This Has Ever Yet Been Mentioned -- Jonah Goldberg Is Kind Of an Idiot

The current incarnation of the Supreme Court of the United States has perhaps decided that it has the sacred duty to remind the nation that all things politely considered, Jefferson Davis had a fair point reasonably expressed, after all. And even if he did not, it is all Water under the Bridge and Laffs now ha ha ha, nobody would ever do anything so gauche as to make it hard for black people to vote, if you ignore many of the major policy and law initiatives of the Republican Party, anyway. (Note: last link totally fucking QED to the fucking QED.)

Bluntness.

The Republican Party does not want black people to vote.

This is just fucking obviously true. It is utterly obviously true. THE GOP DOES NOT WANT BLACK PEOPLE TO VOTE.

Everybody knows this. Dogs know this.

However, you can't just come out and say stupid shit like this.

No, what you need is a colossally naive halfwit to at least attempt to prove that horseshit can equate to a whitewash, as opposed to a brown chunk-shower...

Meaning the Selected Dope has to have to pretend that there are High Moral Principles involved in making it hard for black people to vote.

Hello, Jonah Goldberg.

I can only hope that the scourge of racism is finally purged from Stewartstown and Pinkham's Grant. These are two of 10 New Hampshire towns covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires local officials to get permission, or "preclearance," on any changes to their election laws.

Stewartstown has just over a thousand souls in it and is 99 percent white. In 1970, when it was put under the authority of Section 5, the census listed two blacks out of its 1,008 residents. Pinkham's Grant boasts nine residents, and it must also beg Washington for permission to make any changes to how it votes.

In 1970, New Hampshire required all of its citizens to pass a literacy test to register to vote. But Pinkham's Grant, Stewartstown and the other eight towns also had low voter-participation rates. These two factors -- a test of any kind for voting and participation rates under 50 percent -- met the criteria for oversight under Section 5.

But after years of onerous preparation, the state filed for a "bailout" from the oversight provisions of Section 5 in November. And although the Justice Department hasn't taken a whole state off its watch list since the early 1980s (back when that hotbed of Jim Crow, Maine, was taken off the list), New Hampshire will probably be let off the hook.

If we are being extremely charitable and granting Goldberg a point here, that point is utterly opaque, or else asinine.

First, it is not goofy at all that we have a federal law that looks out for that one person in that one strange place who wants to do that one most basic American thing: vote.

"Literacy Tests" are anti-democratic. You don't have to be able to read to be able to vote. You just have to have be an American.

That apparently means less to our right wing friends than it means to me.

Those two people Jonah sneers at in that small place? Fuck him, I'm proud the federal government is there for them. That's my United States.

You know? Goldberg's piece continues as to being stupid, but I will rest here.

YES. The MOST appropriate use of federal power is to ensure that every single American gets a fair chance to vote and to have that vote counted.

I swear to fucking Christ, they want to fight the Civil War all over again. Goldberg is too stupid to know it, but that's kind of what it is, no? They want a National Reboot, only Done Right. Far Right.

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In cable news, think tanks, talk radio, and, of course, the Internet, conservatives have at least rough parity with, and often superiority to, liberals. It’s only in the legacy institutions — newspapers, the broadcast networks, and most especially academia and Hollywood — that conservatism is still largely frozen out. Nonetheless, conservatism is a mass-market enterprise these days, for good and for ill.

The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.

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Strictly Comedy

Jonah Goldberg wishes to explain to us jokes, how do they work. Next he'll explain magnets.

Jon Stewart’s response to Paul Krugman is very funny. See for yourself. It’s also very interesting.

Yes, very interesting, Jonah. But stupid.

To take this from the top. Last week The Daily Show did a glib, dick-jokey bit on the platinum coin idea. Paul Krugman, and others, responded by saying that the segment was trite and not funny because Stewart clearly didn't understand the point of the coin and why it had come up in the first place. Then the other night Stewart replied with another, slightly less dick-jokey bit (embedded below) wherein he essentially said neener, the platinum coin is stupid because it's stupid, you like it when I make dick jokes about Fox, huh, right don't you huh.

It wasn't much of a response, but whatever.

Stewart is good at two things, dick jokes and main-stream & far right media dismemberment. I have no problem with dick jokes -- why, I may possibly have made one myself once, many years ago. And Stewart is clearly brilliant when it comes to skewering the media.

But when his show takes on other issues (especially political or economic) it's hit or miss. And the misses are usually when he lazily takes an "all sides are equally wacky I'm so reasonable" posture which is not so distinct from bog-standard High Punditry. When he really wants to go after, say, Fox, note how he'll do some real analysis, digging up old clips and looking stuff up. When it comes to something like the platinum coin, it doesn't occur to him that he might not understand the issue -- it's doxa that We Must Be Serious about the Debt. It's Very Serious Impersonating, with dick jokes as cover.

None of which means I don't like the show. You just have to take it for what it is -- sometimes brilliant, but sometimes blinkered.

Which gets us back to Goldberg, who is never brilliant, and not so much blinkered as a person who makes a living as contortionist able to stick his head up his butt from many different angles at once.

Krugman was scandalized by The Daily Show’s mockery of the trillion-dollar coin idea. I don’t think I’m shattering anyone’s illusions when I say that Krugman is extremely arrogant and thinks of himself as the infallible Pope of progressivism and the Dean of the Reality Based Community. So when The Daily Show, which many see as somewhere between the official spokesman and the Court theater troupe of those constituencies, mocked an idea Krugman has championed, well, something must have gone terribly wrong. Hence, Krugman says that when Stewart just pretends to be a know-nothing while mocking complicated things as dumb Stewart is in fact “hurting his own brand.”

All of which is the usual cud-chewing. With the usual attempt to pass off far-right gibberish as Very Serious Stuff through a rhetorical back door: Stewart is

absolutely right that liberals will forgive Stewart everything and anything when he’s skewering the right, no matter how unfair. What I think he misses is the degree to which the show’s biggest fans don’t realize how unfair the show is to the views it mocks. The college kids who get all of their news from The Daily Show, think it’s funny because it’s true, even though they have no clue what the truth of the matter is.

Note the utter lack of anything here that resembles, well, evidence. When has Stewart been "unfair" to the right? In what instances? There are these things on the Internet known as "hyper-links" -- could Goldberg employ one? Is there evidence that there exist "college kids who get all of their news from The Daily Show"? Is there such a thing as Wikipedia?

Krugman responded to Stewart on a specific point. By ignoring the specific point -- why the platinum coin was proposed -- Goldberg gets to pretend that There Are Big Serious Conservative Ideas that are Unfairly Ignored or Maligned.

Which is even yet still more proof that one of the most striking features of Movement Conservatism is the appalling laziness that makes even the High Pundit class look like they're working. Shit, even Tom Friedman gets out of the mansion once in a while to talk to cab drivers. Goldberg demands that he be Taken Seriously without ever figuring out how to make an argument past the third-grade level. ("Nuh-uh, you're the fascist! Nuh-uh, you're the one who uses cliches!")

"Wingnut welfare" doesn't even cover it. If you can't get ahead in the Marketplace of Ideas, insist upon a policy of Affirmative Reaction.

 

 

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Paul Krugman & the Trillion Dollar Coin
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Fapparatchik

Jonah Goldberg is nip-twisty angry.

it's hardly news that much of the press likes to report the convention as they want it to be rather than as it is.

It's also somewhat less than a thunderclap revelation that the press and the Democratic Party tend to see things the same way. Which is why it's unremarkable that the "fact-checkers" and Democratic Party press-release writers are on the same page.

Well, that's news.

I love Jonah Goldberg. He is a living, farting refutation of the right wing doxa that if you have Gotten Ahead in Our Capitalist Paradise, that is evidence of Hard Work and Superior Brainpower.

Or consider the media's obsession with the alleged racism of the GOP.

Alleged!

The state Republican parties are pushing voter suppression under cover of spurious "ID" laws, and Romney is running transparent lying welfare race-baiting ads.

That's pretty fucking racist.

Oh no wait Freedom is Threatened if poor people can vote, and rich people are not allowed to spend billions to tell comical lies and buy elections.

MAS. Remember how fucking afraid they were of Sinead? Ha! Say "boo" too these fuckers in the right place at the right time, they will become pussballoons.