Whiskey Fire

Fly Fishing for Gowanus Brown Trout

I haven't pulled a snap inspection of the Townhall inmates in a while. Poo everywhere! Let's get shipshape! This means you, person whose name I always forget seconds after reading it.

Not a neuron firing. What do you have for us?

Italian prodigy, Raphael, once painted two angels in the Sistine Chapel. One chubby cherub wears a mischievous expression as he rests his chin on his hand. The other looks wide-eyed and innocent. This angelic pair has celebrity status if you consider how often they have been reproduced.

Indefensible commas and an aesthetic derived from inspirational posters featuring kittens. Pray continue.

Political historians like myself surmise that these cherubs are also known as "Stupid Cupid" and "Smart Cupid."

Yes. That is exactly what "political historians" of your class would do. I have no doubts at all in this regard.

There follows prattle so debased it includes a "Michael Moore is fat" joke. It need not detain us.

Other Townhall entries are more sophisticated, in the sense that they're just as dumb. Like:

Someone recently remarked that Obama is a one man sleeper cell after hearing about his National Prayer Breakfast remarks and refusal to aid Jordan against ISIS. Sadly, his remark could not have been more accurate.

 "Someone said" is a KAPOW! Subject + Verb start to a News Article. You know you are in Fine Hands. And the thesis is inarguable: "Obama, as a Muslim, knows full well that Islam means 'surrender' to Allah-- or death-- and is inherently violent." So if you were curious about why your hijab chafes, now you know.

In other exciting Townhall news, the Laws of Physics dictate that Charles Darwin was a dick and God's Indomitable Will gave us spirochetes, the US Senate, and who the fuck knows, malware.

And then there's this, which is, upon investigation, an attempt at "humor."

With Valentine's Day upon us, female readers are again pummeling me with questions on how to woo the modern male.

Oh God.

This is a Townhall "joke."

Dear Tom: I appreciate that my boyfriend takes care of himself, in part because he wants to look good for me, but I wish he were a little bit more like my father's generation. When we went to a football tailgate recently, he refused to drink beer like the others - and whined the whole time that nobody brought a bottle of decent chardonnay. Also, his man bag - OK, it's a purse - is bigger than my purse and he doesn't even seem to be embarrassed about that. Am I being overly sensitive? - Overly Sensitive

Dear Overly Sensitive: If anyone is being overly sensitive, it is your boyfriend and millions of men from his generation. These sensitive New Age men are often so in touch with their own emotions and needs that they don't much notice anybody else's. If such a fellow drinks a beer, a rare thing, it will be an exotic brand from some remote part of the planet. He won't drink from a mug, either, but from a wine glass. At baby showers - yes, men are invited to those now - he'll get misty. If he ever becomes a father, he will clap the loudest the first time Junior uses the commode for "No. 2."

No, I don't get it either. But then the whole "heterosexual" thing seems to be going OK with me so far, even if I do get to drink wine on occasion, when I'm not beating the crap out of Dothraki or some such shittery. 

God Hates Dead Trolls

The universe of trolldom has just lost a consummate master of the art: Fred Phelps. The guy trolled the fucking Supreme Court!

Acting like the biggest asshole in the country made him famous. You have to respect that.

And let's remember that his genius lay in the decision to picket military funerals. That's what put him over the top. Schmucky homophobes, you can find them anywhere. But going after dead soldiers -- brilliant.

That was a man who intimately understood the theatre of trollery. Fred Phelps, the Bard of Bigotry.

 

 

Eternal Flame

Just had a brilliant idea: Why not make November 22nd* American Firearms Day? We can each take a few moments to remember the Freedom & Liberty brought to this country by armed crazies wandering the streets while we gloss over the millions murdered, dead or permanently damaged because people like you are trusted w/ firearms in these United Snakes & to remind us all that were it not for guns, we wouldn't need guns!!

Although, in all fairness, to be balanced & objective, no skin off our teeth, so whatevs:

I remember when I was five

We were sittin' in school when the teacher cried

She told everybody that the President died

But that didn't bother me 'cause I was still alive!

Cobbled together from ranted droolings chez moi & a Twit.

Hey Patriots: Let's make 22 Nov. American Firearms Day, to celebrate the Freedom & Liberty guns have brought America. No? How about June 6?

— M. Bouffant (@MBouffant) November 22, 2013

---

*April 14th? Wait, use this list.

The Smart Ones

The Internet Right believes that they Know Things, which is amusing, yet troubling.

Here is a comical emanation from Freedom Works, for instance. The barely sentient chimpanzee who was paid in syphilis to produce it believes that he has Done a Number on the Left because on the occasion of the first Earth Day in 1970, a lot of people said "we're fucked if we don't do anything."

And then the Federal Government created the EPA, and in lots of easily measurable ways it worked, and so the bad things predicted in 1970 about what would happen if nothing were done... turned out to be broadly accurate, because something was done!

Hooray for democratic government! The river in your city is unlikely to ignite; that is a Win for Freedom from Combustible Rivers.

But there are always gigs open for revisionist history, as this Townhall monkey demonstrates in his desperate, screechy plea for MOAR BANANAS. Best part!

What is true, I venture, is that our national trip into the vortex of the Iraqi-Afghan-Muslim-terror-war whirlpool was predestined under existing circumstances -- an aspect of fate; postponable, maybe, but unavoidable.

Such was always the dolorous fate of the Ty-D-Bowl Commander-in-Chief-Man, I guess.

As to why exactly these people write like Bulwer-Lytton just ate six cans of beans, who can say, but light a match under them, I dare you. Or inquire about who generally you can count on for a fancy prose style?

Other Dexter-class geniuses inform us that it is totally stupid and perhaps gay but anyway LIEBERAL to at all wonder if the older Boston bomber might have gone crazy, at least partially, because he got hit on the head a lot.

Here is the Snappy Riposte of Jim Treacher, who if he has not been hit on the head a lot, is devoid of excuses for talking:

As for Tamerlan’s little brother? That wuss doesn’t look like he could beat up Honey Boo Boo. Although he’s almost as good as her at driving a car.

Honey Boo Boo! Wuss! Honey Boo Boo! These are jokes! AIRPLANE FOOD IS NOT VERY GOOD!

The little brother was a wrestler; "Jim Treacher" is someone who exists on the Internet. Let the utterly pointless asinine cock-measuring begin!

"Treacher" wants us to know that it is absurd to think that one of the reasons the older brother started to go crazy might be brain damage, because the Obvious Answer is Islam. This is because almost every Muslim plants bombs and shoots cops, while every multiple concussion sufferer hugs kittens.

Which is not to say that the concussion theory is all-explanatory! It obviously isn't! Yes, crazy far-right Islamism exists! (Al Qaeda is obviously far-right, conservative-fascism. Radical Islam is dangerous, like the NRO Fifth Column.)

But is "Islam!" an even worse explanation?

Let's ask Katie!

Guns, guns, guns. Love, love, love. America needs guns and love.

See?

Now we have made progress.

Oh Why Not

Whatever. Commentary.

Polls have shown that the effort has not been enough to prevent a precipitous drop in his share of the prospective Jewish vote from the 78 percent he garnered in 2008. However, it will probably help him maintain a comfortable majority of Jewish votes in November as most of this predominantly liberal demographic is prepared to either ignore his past history of conflict with Israel or actually believes in the sincerity of his election-year conversion.

"Polls have shown" nothing of the kind.

But this amuses:

it will probably help him maintain a comfortable majority of Jewish votes in November as most of this predominantly liberal demographic is prepared to either ignore his past history of conflict with Israel

Wow. You're an American liberal Jew, clearly you support Obama's "conflict with Israel"... wait, what?

If this made any sort of sense, it would be, uh, sensical?

 

Picked up the Noise

SEK comments on some comments from Salman Rushdie. Rushdie:

Everybody loves 'The Wire' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series. I love 'The Sopranos.' 'Deadwood,' which didn't last long, was a series I liked a lot; it had more filthy language than I've ever heard on television anywhere in my life, but it was brilliantly written. I like some of what is on now, like 'Breaking Bad' and 'Dexter.'

Leaving aside the question of whether or not the takeaway from that interview ought to be Rushdie's comments on a cable teevee show, Rushdie is in fact correct in his estimation of "The Wire." There is just not much to the series -- a lot of people seem to enjoy it, but frankly, I found its characterizations of the interaction between the police, the community, politicians, and the media remarkably shallow and ultimately unengaging.

The first series had its moments, to be sure. The viewer is invited to appreciate the broad palimpsest that is the city, with its conflicting factions and interests; the mayor is a fascinating character, whose motivations are skilfully left unexplored until the denoument. Pathos is blent with humor: one recognizes why certain cohorts develop among the police actors under the camera's scrutiny -- particularly compelling is the suggestion that the distinction between the "cop" and the "criminal" is one of mere happenstance, depending upon accidents of birth, upbringing, and wholly arbitrary municipal policies. That redemption is discovered in unlikely places is revelatory; violence begets unlikely heroes, ostensible heroes are revealed to be mere charlatans out to satisfy their own vulgar interests. Racial politics amongst the police force is explored with a rare sensitivity.

Yet, to be blunt, later seasons merely ring changes upon this formula. Yes, in the second season we begin to appreciate the fractured, kaleidoscopic reality that is gangland life in the urban milieu. Gang leaders are frenetic, savage, shouty; yet withal they are capable of strange moments of vulnerability, and their motivations revealed as complex and varied. Crimes are committed for absurd stakes, as low as eight dollars, in one memorable instance. Supermarkets are looted, to little purpose. Law enforcement agents lack all intensity, even as the crooks are filled with passionate comedy. Low and tawdry sex affairs between the cops impede the entire investigation, until finally the "wire" subtheme explodes into a wild -- yet implausible -- climax. Conceded: it is hard to find any true "heroism" here, and that complexity exercises the moral intellect, in the manner of aesthetic Kegels.

Nevertheless. Extol the gritty "realism" of the second season as you will; but the final shots of the story arc, implying as they do the happy marriage of a mismatched pair of cross-eyed law-enforcement lovers, are, bluntly, unconvincing. And each of the remaining seasons are naught more than an endless procession of mindless sound effects and fart jokes. It was bad enough when these ragamuffins went to Miami -- but gracious, a trip to Moscow? Trite. You can see why HBO got fed up. In the end only one question remains: what dark cabal conspired to make Steve Guttenberg a star? We shall never know. It is one of Life's Bitter Mysteries.

"The Wire" is absurdly overrated; the case is inarguable. And don't even get me started on the "Battlestar Galactica" remake. Fucking Daggits.

D'Souza Revsionism, Already

Are you ready for some revising? Even rightists can't dance around facts forever; one of them just noticed (besides everything the Pres. typed in his book that D'Souza couldn't be bothered to quote, because it would refute his Unified Bullshit Theory of Mystical Anti-Colonialist Influence) that President Obama really hadn't been around his Luo tribesman father during his formative yrs., so a more plausible malign influence should be found, & surprise, surprise, the demon's been right there all along!

I'm not going to dissect D'Souza's argument. [Oh, we knew that! D.D.'s argument is so fragile we doubt if he'd breathe on it. — M.B.] But I would like to add some important information: If Obama is indeed motivated by anti-colonialism, the source may be Frank Marshall Davis as much as, if not more than, Obama's father.

You know where this is going if you're the sort who's amused enough by these people to be reading this, so I won't bother myself w/ Googling Frank Marshall Davis for you. And if Jeremiah Wright & the Weather Underground are more familiar to you than Davis is, it's only because he didn't leave us w/ as many documented outrages ("God Damn America!!") as the other Obama-molders. Typist Kengor, however, dug deep into the Communist files, because, more surprises, he's pimping* a new book himself.

I come to this via a different route from D'Souza. My new book -- released the same day as D'Souza's, coincidentally -- examined the communist movement in the 20th century, and specifically how communists duped progressives and liberals. I determined, definitively, that Frank Marshall Davis was not a duped liberal but a duping communist. I show this at length, quoting Davis's weekly columns from the CPUSA organ, the Honolulu Record, and reprinting pages from Congressional investigations and from Davis's declassified FBI file, including a document that lists his Communist Party number: 47544.

And Kengor rests his case. Talk about having a guy's number! Heh indeedy!

Oddly enough, there is classical leftist revisionism in Kengor's McCarthyite (No, reactionaries, that is not a compliment. It's an insult, if insulting if still permitted.) screed. It's quickly dismissed as evil anti-Americanism, natch, but Frank Marshall Davis raises an interesting point or two about colonialism.

Consider a May 19, 1949 column, "How Our Democracy Looks To Oppressed Peoples," where Davis excoriated the Marshall Plan. Yes, the Marshall Plan.

"For a nation that calls itself the champion of democracy, our stupendous stupidity is equaled only by our mountainous ego," Davis complained. "Our actions at home and abroad are making American democracy synonymous with oppression." He added: "I have watched with growing shame for my America as our leaders have used our golden riches to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world."

Davis characterized the Marshall Plan as a "device" to maintain "white imperialism." This nefarious "oppression of non-white peoples everywhere" was purchased via Secretary of State George Marshall's "billions of U.S. dollars … to bolster the tottering empires of England, France, Belgium, Holland and the other western exploiters of teeming millions of humans."

In another column a few weeks later, on August 18, Davis stepped up the communist attack on "the double-talking Truman administration with its program for World War III." "The Truman doctrine in Greece and Turkey and then the Marshall Plan," were, claimed Davis, "based upon the continuation of colonial slavery by the ruling classes of Western Europe."

In his next column, Davis protested: "I shall not help England and France keep millions of my colored brothers in Africa and Asia in colonial slavery. Yet that is what our dividend diplomats ask of you and me when they demand our support of the bi-partisan Marshall plan."

I can't disagree w/ that. And the horror doesn't stop. Brace yourselves (My emphasis. COMMIES!):

Yet, there's a more sinister element, as suggested by a July 1935 document held in Comintern Archives in Moscow. That document ordered American comrades (like Davis, who, at that point, lived in Chicago), to go to Hawaii to agitate against Hawaii becoming part of the United States. The Soviets wanted the territory as a base of operations. What would be the party line? The document ordered American communists to claim there was a "growing discontent of the masses of the population in the Hawaiian Islands," resulting from "the regime of colonial oppression and the exploitation of American imperialism with its policy of militarisation of the Hawaiian Islands."

So in 1935 Hawai'i was not a Territory of these United Snakes, but a division of the Dole Corporation? Next we'll be told that until statehood was granted, the islands were just floating out there, unanchored, & menaced by sharks & giant octopi.

That was precisely Davis's position when he relocated to Hawaii, whether by orders, by personal beliefs, or both. And it isn't unreasonable to expect he might have shared such thinking with a bright teenager named Barack Obama. Bear in mind, Obama admitted to learning from Davis, including college advice -- his very next step. Obama describes his first days at college as hanging out with "Marxist professors," attending "socialist conferences," and "discuss[ing] neocolonialism."

Rather than heralding the American exceptionalism that sought freedom for the people of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Davis would have passed to Obama a very different narrative about America's place in the world, beginning with its alleged imperial-colonial sins.

This was the wrong side of history, but it was the side of Frank Marshall Davis. The remaining question is to what extent this affected Obama, then and still today.

Should those whose idea of history is to stand athwart it yelling "Commie!" at the top of their lungs ever be taken seriously when they decide which side of history is "right?" I think not.

But that is quite a question Mr. History poses. 30-plus yrs. ago some guy maybe repeated to Obama something he'd typed 20-plus yrs. before that? Since nobody, nowhere knows nothin', no how, 'bout Obama, except what they think he's thinking, based on any wild delusion (but seldom on anything he's actually said & done) there's just no way that remaining question could be answered, is there?

At least not until the President's Executive Order on Hawai'i is issued. Then we'll know whether he's handing it over to the Hawai'ians, selling it back to Dole, or just turning it into Airstrip One & running all the drone attacks in Pakistan & Afghanistan from Pearl Harbor.

*Referred to a man as pimping something! Can I expect an avalanche of mens rights weasels complaining?

M. Bouffant (A whore just like the rest.)

A. Grandma's Underpants

Q. What we see through you like.  As Bart Simpson put it.

In the comments to the last post:

You know I find this a little disconcerting. First Obama goes into all this gay rights crap that nobody cares about, and now Reid introduces the Public Option? Most of us don't want to see socialized medicine. Now I voted for Obama last time, but if the Democrats succeed in socializing medicine, or even try to do so, I will NOT be voting for him or any other Democrat next time around. Just my two cents.

Posted by: center left grrrl 

First week on the Internet, is it?

Bitter Fish in Crude Oil Sea

Connoisseurs of Very Internetty meltdowns will enjoy this post by Roger Pielke Jr. I've not been following the trials and tribulations of Mr. Pileke Jr. with any great attention, though he does appear to have Suffered Greatly at the hands of Electronic Malefactors. List O List to his Tale o' Woe.

Here is how it works. The really giant fish -- public intellectuals like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman -- confer authority on the big fish of the liberal blogosphere. They do so by applauding the work of the big fish and saying that they trust them. This is a useful exchange because the big fish amplify the writings of the giant fish in the blogosphere and do the dirty work of taking down their political opponents by playing some gutter politics that the giant fish would rather not be seen playing. This has the effect of establishing the big fish as people to be listened to, not because they are necessarily right about things, but because the giant fish listen to them and the giant fish set political agendas.

Thomas Friedman is great giant fish who confers authority on Big Liberal Blog-fish by saying he trusts them? I hadn't known this previously. I mean, I'd always figured Tom Friedman was, essentially, perhaps a carp or similar; he's certainly not a writer. As for the Paul Krugman thing, well, absolutely -- as a Giant Fish, he has great trouble playing gutter politics (you try holding a shiv in your dorsal fin). So he makes other people do it, by poking them with one of those little wooden lobster forks. This is, of course, well known. 

Much of the rest of the piece is Pielke complaining about the wickedness of Brad DeLong's blog comments policy, a topic that proves surprisingly uninteresting. Also Pielke doesn't like Tim Lambert, who is in turn not much of fan of Pielke's, to say the least.

What is really impressive about Pielke though is how spectacularly incompetent he is when it comes to metaphors. He mixes them more violently than even, say, Tom Friedman:

The big fish then feed on the minnows, for instance, Real Climate and Brad DeLong have cited Tim Lambert as an authority, including on my own work, yet to my knowledge Lambert has never actually engaged anything I've published in the peer reviewed literature much less any substantive arguments that I've made. Of course he doesn't -- he is not qualified to do so. Joe Romm just makes stuff up and even when shown to be in error he plows ahead. They then incestuously cite each other. This creates a valuable political smokescreen for the giant fish. The giant fish then get plausible deniability from engaging in what might seem to be less-than ethical behavior, the big fish get the ego-strokes of acknowledgment from the giant fish and the occasional top-line billing among favorable-leaning media. Similarly the minnows get to parlay inexpertise into a small role in the politics of personal destruction, and are cited by the big fish, but never by the media or the giants, which would be unbecoming....

Right. So, to sum up:

Big fish eat tiny minnow fish, except for one of the big fish, who has a fanciful aquatic imagination and also employs powerful farm machinery for the purposes of forward progress. The large fish and the devoured minnows and the farmer fish are all in the same family and fuck each other -- which is a neat trick, to eat a fish and then fuck it. Don't try this at home. Nevertheless, the fish-family-fucking is really intense; the friction is so great that even underwater it creates a great big giant cloud of impenetrable smoke. HAWT. Meanwhile, the giant fish, such as the Tom Friedman fish, hide behind the fish-fuck-smoke to cop feels off the big fish, the dirty scaly buggers. At this selfsame instant, the media is so taken with all this incestuous fuck-smoke fish-shit that they make these randy sub-marine perverts the headline act at a concert or vaudeville entertainment -- for reasons that I trust are clear. Then the minnows, which have already been in this paragraph swallowed and then fucked by their immediate, larger relatives, go to the track to make risky bets as a means of getting bit parts in a movie, or perhaps politics, even though the giant Tom Friedman fish stubbornly consider them declasse, what with them fucking and getting eaten by other fish they're related to, and fair enough, I suppose. The farmer fish meanwhile is forgotten about.

This is very excellent writing. I hope you've learned something.

Demons Are Real

Re: Murder in Kansas.

See, now that Bush is out off office and we've given over to the politics of appeasement in the face of religious extremists bent on violence, the homeland is once more the target of terrorism.

Because it's terrorism, terrorism that works, and we're clearly not prepared to confront it as such.

UPDATE. BTW, this is gallows humor, duh. Looking at the actual record, while an abortion provider has not been killed since 1998, that hardly means that there has been no anti-abortion terrorism since then, as even a cursory examination indicates. The murder of Dr. Tiller is anything but an "isolated incident." So much for waterboarding keeping "us" "safe."

Which just goes to show, while this may be repulsive, it at least has the virtue of being ethically consistent: 

I can’t help but to follow the logic. “Doctor” Tiller is committing late-term abortions, which by any sane person’s calculation is infanticide. This is murder. Through perversion of the law, this is permitted, despite it flying the face of the history of civilization. This has been tolerated for two decades, and nothing has happened to stop the killing. He would have continued to commit this crime.

I can’t escape the conclusion that killing Tiller was the right thing to do. I am uncomfortable with this conclusion because it’s dangerous. But nevertheless, it was the ethical thing to do. Tiller would have continued to take numerous lives. Nothing was going to stop him. So someone did stop him. And now fewer lives will be taken.

Never mind that the author of this Red State comment next decides to compare Tiller's killer to Rosa Parks (!).

Look, if you think abortion is "murder," this commenter's position is not very far out there. I don't, so I can say that it is pretty far out there, which it is. But the people who do think abortion is murder do tend to correlate pretty closely with those who think that, say, something as awful as torture is justified in entirely imaginary scenarios (no bombs were in fact ticking, remember) involving the mass loss of life. Well, following this "logic," with abortion, arguendo, you have an actual mass loss of life. Why be willing to get all twisty about the "rule of law" in regards to the subjunctive threats posed by terror subjects but not the (again, arguendo) empirical killing of innocents?

Far be it from me to suggest that the anti-choice crowd aren't willing to accept the consequences of their arguments, but, well, actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. See also (passim) the unseriousness of the idea that "murder" ought to "be left to the states to decide," or that women who pay to have someone commit "murder" on their behalf ought to face no legal penalty.

FINALLY. Clearly, abortion is just a form of birth control. Late term abortions especially.