Whiskey Fire

The Terrorists Are Winning

LAPD, terrorists.

Yeah, I said it.

Just a Thought

If New Jersey is going to spend millions to attract tourists to a big giant shopping mall in the Meadowlands, maybe New Jersey taxpayers ought to pony up to improve transportation infrastructure across the HUDSON Fucking River.

After all, there's lots of people and tourists in Manhattan. If you really want to dump public funds into a tourist attraction right across from it, making it as easy as possible to get there sure would be a big economic shot in the arm.

I don't know where the money for such an infrastructure project might come from, though. Probably public empoyee unions already stole it.

MAS. Yes I know.

I Don't Judge

But I don't own any fucking stuffed animals.

Little Lines They Say

In brief:

1. Caroline Kennedy is having trouble with the upstate NY media...? I have no problem with her running for office in NY. But she has to run. I mean, damn! Nothing screams "not ready" more than a botched trip to Rochester, of all places. If you're ever in a position where you find yourself obliged to go to Rochester, NY, in order to make a good impression crucial to your personal future... you're in bad shape already, never mind if you then proceed to fuck it up. Should have started off in Plattsburgh, maybe, or if that's too fast-lane, Vestal Center, saying "hi!" to our chickens. Sheeeeeeesh...

That said, Charles Krauthammer is pretty comical; look who you gave us as president, ya big galoot. Kennedy would certainly be a better Senator right now than, say, Peter King, who has loads of "experience," but is also a horrible asshole. If Paterson were to nominate a placeholder, and CK wants to spend 2 years gearing up to fight King, then, well, excellent. THAT campaign I'll volunteer for, all out.

I just don't see it working in NY for her, being appointed, long term. Of course I may be wrong.

2. Fuck Rick motherfucking Warren, anyhow.

3. Mark Felt is dead. Nixon's revenge is complete. The fiend.

4. Mona Charen is talking about PORN!

Hugh Hefner, the godfather of mainstream porn, apparently does not have normal sex with his many girlfriends. Despite the presence of up to seven comely young women in his bed at a time, he uses porn for sexual satisfaction. Think about that.

Actually, please don't think about that, because it would make you scoop out your eyes with a grapefruit spoon, and then how would you read my blog?

But that is not to say there are no lessons here. Chief among these lessons is that, apparently, Mona Charen thinks about how Hugh Hefner masturbates, and she disapproves. If it were not for the Internet, I would never have known that. And now you know it too! I think that's great. Hooray for the Internet! Hooray! Hooray!

Dammit. When Mona Charen climbs into bed with seven comely young people, she fucks 'em, just like God intended! And when she masturbates, she does not use PORN, but presumably, only her fingers and the bottomless resources of her imagination. Hooray!

(I keep up with Hef via The Soup. And how could you not? -- Last link not safe for work. Or home, for that matter.)

5. I'm on a kick where I'm reading books that we have in the house, that are books I should have read, but for some reason have not. For instance, I just finished Dracula, by Gram Smoker. Never read it before, but had it in the house. It reads fairly well, though a lot of it is tedious 19th-century farting around. And then you also get a lot of stuff that should be scary, but then oddly, turns out to be rather dull, even for the characters themselves. The most egregious of these scenes occurs late in the book: Von Helsing is camping out with Mina, and the three Scary Chick Vampires show up to hassle Mina, but VH has put down Holy Communion Anti-Vampire Paste, and so all the Undead can do is say a lot of spooky shit and gesture a lot. VH says he isn't afraid, nothing happens, the sun comes up, the freaky broads go home, and VH takes a nap. Gripping stuff: "I got bored, eventually got some sleep, was never very alarmed" -- way to build the tension, Gram.

But then how much can you complain about a novel that kills off a stereotypical Texan just because someone has to die? Still, Wilkie Collins did this sort of thing a lot more entertainingly, if not much more deftly. Writing Victorian thrillers, that is, not killing Texans. At least, insofar as I'm aware.

Cost of the Albatross

UPDATE. Oh, let's just put this up top, and ask ourselves, who is more of an imbecile, the imbecile who writes the e-mail, or the NRO editor who publishes it?

COINCIDENCE?   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Question from a reader:

Does the selloff on Wall Street have anything to do with the increasing likelihood that Obama will be our next president? 

Note that the two trends — the financial meltdown, despite passage of the bailout, and the solidification of Obama's lead — are coinciding.  At a minimum, the market's behavior is not a vote of confidence in an Obama presidency.

Joe Conason could right now probably just go take all of his 1990s columns, scratch out "Bill Clinton," write in "Barack Obama," and take the next eight years off. 

DOWNDATE. Something I think about every four years or so is that Undecided Voters = Morons. Here is an undecided voter in Minnesota, who is specifically undecided about the Senate race between Al Franken, the irremediably stupid Norm Coleman, and another guy.

Rochester resident Scott Forstie, 43, brought his son, Zack, 14, to the debate. He said he doesn't know whom he will vote for but that he was most impressed by Barkley on Sunday night.

Forstie said foreign affairs and the economy weigh most heavily on his mind and that Barkley's message of fiscal discipline resonated with him.

During the debate, Barkley promoted a four-year federal spending freeze and said, "I'm not going to promise new spending ... I'm not going to pander to you."

Forstie liked that.

"It was refreshing to hear someone say they weren't going to promise me something they couldn't deliver," Forstie said.

Barkley just did that, you idiot.

Panic

The point of the $700 billion bailout bill was to prevent a "panic."

Heckuva job.

Gory League Highlights

Things that suck.

1. The new SiteMeter sucks.

2. The Mets bullpen sucks.

3. When gnats fly behind your glasses and into your eyeballs -- that sucks.

4. Trying to find your own specific silver-gray minivan among the literally dozens of identical silver-gray minivans in the parking lot immediately after your 9-Year-Old's soccer game: that can kind of suck, especially if your 9-Year-Old is making fun of you for your (momentary!) confusion.

5. The Mayberry Machiavellianism of the Bush administration sucks; the minor league Mayberry Machiavellianism of a McCain administration would suck epic assloads of ass.

6. This NYT headline does NOT suck: "Banks Fear Next Move By Shorts." The financial fuckup described in the story sucks and is very serious stuff, but the adolescent-minded among us will snigger at the headline, and, sometimes... that's enough.

7. The Sneed is The Suck.

8. This is the opposite of suck.

9. Via The Demon Machine, a great comment at a great post!

Besides, what you list is attempts by others to strain at gnats, as well ... even as they continue to swallow the camels of death and destruction whole, by supporting a candidate who by all appearances is more inclined to confront We the People as "imperialist", than he is to confront true thieves of life and liberty.
           Rich Casebolt | Homepage | 09.13.08 - 5:20 pm | #

"The Camels of Death and Destruction" is awesome. Such fearsome dromedaries cannot suck, by definition. The rest of the thread is good, too, but it is like drinking straight from the Hose of the Dumb, so be warned.

I Write to You to Show You

I can't be the first person who's thought this, but as I complete a book manuscript, it seems to me doing endnotes as opposed to links feels kind of weird. Blogging has made the entire process of going to find a book and looking something up in it seem quite wearying.

Build Our Island Towers High

1. What exactly is the point of "The Page" by Mark Helperin? There are already lots of aggregators available -- why do we need one put together by a person widely considered a total tool? I only stopped by because I figured there'd be some toolishness I could make fun of, but bleah, it's just a bunch of shit available elsewhere at sites that are not adorned with pictures of Mark Helperin.

Dear Time Magazine:

Mark Helperin just ain't that pretty.

Love,

Thers

2. Speaking of idiotic attempts to pretend that there is a market for waterhead insidery nonpartisan nonsense, remember Hot Soup? Me either.

3. Comedy.

4. Red State bans Ron Paul supporters. They're very serious, over at Red State. They only let you into their asylum if you're convinced you're Napoleon or Metternich or Erasmus or Richard Perle or a historical figure of similar stature, and dress in a colorful costume accordingly.   

5. I'm convinced that nobody really gives a flying fuck about Congressional resolutions to approve or condemn anyone's fucking speech, and that what people really want is for our government to end this fucking war. I think people are sick to their fucking eyeteeth about the whole hysterical passing show and just want the fucking war OVER.

No More Following Eyes

Busy busy very very busy busy.

So, short takes.

1. Some hard times for our friends at LGM. For Dave especially. Peace to Dave & his family.   

2. Saw the Olbermann segment on the Frosts tonight. C&L has it here. That Whiskey Fire was one of the first moonbat blogs out of the gate in calling bullshit on the asinine freeper post that started the whole idiotic, mean-spirited jihad against this family is perhaps my second-proudest moment online ever (having Althouse call me "insolent" will be pretty hard to top). That trivia aside, though, I thought the Frosts did very well. Peace to their family, also.

The "debate" on SCHIP was never really "about" this one family. I always thought so. Which makes it difficult to fathom why the wingnuts decided to pretend that it was, viciously and wrongly so, while simultaneously screeching that... it wasn't. Weird. Anyway, the Frosts went through a lot of shit, so I hope it's more than a small consolation to them that they came out of all this with their cause advanced. More pressure, folks.  That veto needs a beatdown.

And, for the record, my motivation for mouthing off in the first place was that it made me mad that this family was marked for the full "kerning" treatment from the get-go. That was messed up.

3. Lamentably, my correspondence with Robert Stacy McCain has foundered. You'll never believe this, but he accused me of not being civil.

Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I hold the entire concept of "civility" in contempt, at least as it is currently conceived.

Mr. Stacy McCain sent me a long email of the sort that only really weird people send (I've seen more than a few such specimens). He did this for the purposes of defending himself against what he thinks is an unfair online pile-up. I pointed out to him what should have been clear from my original post, that he couldn't do so convincingly without repenting his post in support of Malkin, because of the rather staggering amount of hypocrisy involved. 

He seems to feel that I ought to value his notion of "civility," and should be willing to sacrifice to it my notions of right and wrong.

Maybe next time.