To The Great Consternation Of Conservatarians
It turns out that there is a
Fourth Amendment after all.
Conservatarians will say that the court has here undermined the Great Crusade aganist islamofascism, while Libertarians will agree with the court, but will secretly add that really, Ashcroft torching the Fourth Amendment is no better or worse than, say, the government using tax monies to fund Head Start programmes. All freedom is equal, after all.
Yes, I'm doing this to aggravate
digamma in a friendly way. But I mean it, too.
Joining An Exclusive Club (double entendre not intended)
Roll Call's
Mark Preston joins
Mike Krempasky as finalists in the competition of Most Unintentionally Hilarious Santorum References. Preston probably wins but I'm biased toward Krempasky who saw fit to personally elaborate on his cluelessness here on my blog.
No And Yes
Dear
T-Gun teases me by sending a story about "
Hippy Fascists". Funny, but So. Very. Wrong.
How shall I counter her point?
This will have to do.
Edit: Yeah, I know my reply is a non-sequitur. What can I say? I got nothin'. Maybe my point was that I can't be outdone with outrageous political links. Yeah, that's the ticket.
The Coolest Thing Since Hipgnosis
"100 of the world's most celebrated artists chose their favorite musicians and created ...The Greatest Album Covers That Never Were"
Very Nice. I found this via
Kurt Vonnegut's website. Vonnegut contributed a cover for Phish, by the way.
Added: Just what is it about Debbie Harry that is so alluring to better artists? The above cover is simple, excellent, gorgeous. Yet the masterly H.R. Giger also
chose to work with the Blondie Girl. There is indeed a beautiful plasticity in Debbie Harry -- in her image and in her (and her co-writer, Chris Stein's) music. Is this the draw? I suppose it's rare enough that one finds superficiality appealing and so it's irresistible when it happens: the artist as the beguiled, a compulsive.
So Long, Tenure
What a
dumbfuck. Of course, he's in North Carolina, so it's no guarantee that he'll be disciplined, and in fact, I hope he isn't.
It's better that he'll be harassed by students. And humiliated.
(Via
Atrios.)
Don't Let It Die
Atrios, bless him, keeps hammering at the "liberals" who went along with the Iraqi Operation. This time it's
in the wounding conclusion to an entry defending Kerry's viability as a candidate. As such, it's a sort of an after-thought. But then again, it's not.
And, I would add, if Peter Beinart hadn't been the editor of the New Republic these past few years, Iraq might actually not be the subject of this election.
Damn right. This particular censure needs to be repeated until after the election -- kept alive, but not necessarily expanded. Yet. The election and unity is what matters most now but win or lose, after the election some people deserve a bit of time in purgatory of the sort that
this guy, to his enduring credit, has put himself through.
I'm not advocating figurative trials; I'm advocating intense and precise criticism which will hopefully activate some guilt and self-searching.
Well, You're Both Brain-Dead Fatfucks But The Similarities End There
Jonah.
Rather more detailed Jonah-bashing may be found at
TBOGG's.
Hysterical Documents
A batch of Reagan letters has been
put up for sale and, as the author mentions, they hint at the "hidden side" of Dear Departed Ronnie, our designated senile old TelePrompter Reader of the 1980s, whose combined mean-spiritedness and idiocy has proved to be such an inspiration for the Bushies.
he letters to George Murphy span a period beginning in the late 1970s and ending in the early 1990s. In one, Reagan dismisses the nation's biggest newspapers as biased liberal distributors of "daily poison."
In others he offers help in "deep-sixing" Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), "the playboy from Massachusetts"; accuses Walter Mondale of "lying through his teeth"; and lambasts President Carter over a disastrous attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran.
In later letters, Reagan expresses disbelief over the "fuss" created by the Iran-Contra affair, and castigates a Democrat-controlled Congress for repeated investigations of Republican presidents.
"Well they haven't gotten the noose around my neck, and they won't because I've been telling the truth," Reagan said.
Reagan and Murphy, both conservatives, appeared together in the 1943 screen version of Irving Berlin's musical "This is the Army," and made parallel jumps into politics. Both were presidents of the Screen Actors Guild (news - web sites). Murphy served as a U.S. senator for California from 1965 to 1971.
The two continued to correspond after Reagan left office. In one 1990 note, Reagan complained about declining morals in Hollywood.
"If it was what it used to be the Guild members would refuse to read lines with 4 letter words and profanity," Reagan wrote. "I'm sure we would have ruled out the nudity and sex too."
It's all in there in the correspondence, that which many of us knew so well, and all along: the agreed-upon deceit, the self-pity, the revisionism, the paranoia, the crudity of thought, the willingness to engage in dirty tricks. Yeah, Good Old Ronnie, who could always make up for such things by smiling and being "optimistic".
Just Sayin'
Props to
The Hegemo, from whom I've stolen many links over the past year or so.
Our George: Not Exactly A Southern Baptist
There was no teetotaling Damascene conversion for George Washington, who was unlike our current leader in so many other ways, too.
Everyone knows Ol' George
grew hemp, but did you know that he, like
Uncle Jesse,
operated a still?
Wingnuts, so often wrong on the subject of the Founders' religion, are also wrong on the Founders' habits: to find people in history that resemble the Religious Right, one just has to look in other places. Like, say, in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Hugo Black
A few years ago, I went through what was on the net at the time about, as well as through
Roger K. Newman's biography of, Justice Hugo Lafayette Black, and saved my favorites of Black's sayings and writings, which I reproduce here.
To the extent that you still enjoy the Bill of Rights in the Age of Ashcroft is largely due to Hugo Black and a few others on the Warren Court of the 1950s-60s.
A brief biography may be found
here. Some of his memoirs are collected
here.
Here is the entry on Black at Oyez;
this is the Black bio at the Supreme Court History site. And last but not least,
this is a copy of one of Black's lectures on the Bill of Rights.
Quotes are from Black's personal life, his Senate career, as well as his long residence at the High Court.
"I do not believe the word 'person' in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations."
"the history of the [14th] amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments... corporations have neither race nor color...[the amendment] was intended to protect the life, liberty and property of human beings."
"First in the catalogue of human liberties essential to the life and growth of a government of, for and by its people are those liberties written into the First Amendment of our Constitution. They are the pillars upon which popular government rests and without which a government of free men cannot long survive. History persuades me that the moving forces which brought about the creation of the safeguards contained in the other sections of our Bill of Rights sprang from a resolute determination to place the liberties defined in the First Amendment in an area wholly safe and secure against any invasion -- even by the government."
"..the First Amendment does not speak equivocally. It prohibits any law 'abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.' It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow."
[The First Amendment] "rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public, that a free press is a condition of a free society... Freedom to publish is guarnteed by the Constitution, but freedom to combine to keep others from publishing is not."
"Neither a state nor the federal government can set up a state church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force or influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or nonattendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the federal government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by laws was intended to 'erect a wall of separation between Church and State.'"
"The only thing that troubles me at this present time is the effort of many people, allowedly backed by most of the press, to plunge this country into a new war with Russia. Such a thing is especially frightful to contemplate... There seems to be a widespread opinion that what this country should do is to attack Russia at once, destroy her cities with atomic bombs, and thus win an easy victory. Even if this could be done, the prospect of our engaging in such a wholesale slaughter as we did at Hiroshima is not inviting to a man of peaceful instincts." (1946)
[Harry Truman has] "no background or understanding .. no fundamental philosophy and very little knowledge of history."
In the Context of Loyalty Oaths and the Spying on Neighbours Climate of the 1950s:
"..whenever the test oath was in vogue, spies and informers found rewards far more tempting than truth. These experiences underline the wisdom of the basic constitutional precept that penalties should be imposed only for a person's conduct...
Like everyone else, individual Communists who commit overt acts in violation of valid laws can and should be punished. But the postulate of the First Amendment is that our free institutions can be maintained without proscribing or penalizing political belief, speech, press, assembly, or party affiliation..it is the heart of the system on which our freedom depends.
Fears of alien ideologies have frequently agitated the nation and inspired legislation aimed at suppressing advocacy of those ideologies. At such times the fog of public excitement obscures the ancient landmarks set up in out Bill of Rights. Yet then, of all times, should this Court adhere most closely to the course they mark."
"The First Amendment presumes that free speech will preserve, not destroy, the nation."
"My belief is that we must have freedom of speech, press and religion for all or we may eventually have it for none. I further believe that the First Amendment grants an absolute right to believe in any governmental system, discuss all governmental affairs, and argue for desired changes in the existing order.
This freedom is too dangerous for bad, tyrannical governments to permit. But those who wrote and adopted our First Amendment's unequivocal command that freedom of assembly, petition, speech and press shall not be abridged."
"The motives behind the state law [of censorship] may have been to do good. But the same can be said about most laws making opinions publishable as crimes. History indicates urges to do good have led to the burning of books and even to the burning of 'witches'".
"I believe the First Amendment forbids Congress to punish people for talking about public affairs, whether or not such discussion incites to action, legal or illegal. As the Virginia Assembly said in 1785, in its 'Statute for Religious Liberty,' written by Thomas Jefferson, 'it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace..'"
More Bill of Rights Stuff:
"I read 'no law abridging' to mean no law abridging. [The First Amendment] has thus fixed its own value on freedom of speech and press by putting these freedoms wholly 'beyond the reach' of federal power to abridge... While it is 'obscenity and indecency' before us today, the experiance of mankind -- both ancient and modern -- shows that this type of elastic phrase can, and most likely, will be synonymous with the political and maybe with the religious unorthodoxy of tomorrow. Censorship is the deadly enemy of freedom and progress. The plain language of the Constitution forbids it."
"It is my belief that there are 'absolutes' in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there by men who knew what words meant, and meant their prohibitions to be 'absolute'".
"Our First Amendment was a bold effort this principle -- to establish a country with no legal restrictions of any kind upon the subjects people could investigate, discuss and deny. The Framers knew, perhaps better than we do today, the risks they were taking. they knew that free speech might be the friend of change and revolution. But they knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny... Loyalty comes from love of a good government, not a fear of a bad one."
"the men who founded this country and wrote our Bill of Rights were strangers neither to a belief in the 'right of revolution' nor the urgency of the need to be free from the control of government with regard to political beliefs and associations... This country's freedom was won by men who, whether they believed in it or not, certainly practiced revolution in the Revolutionary War."
"As time goes on, I am more persuaded that one of the worst blows struck against free speech in this country [was Justice Holmes's] cryptic statement about 'shouting fire in a crowded theater'. It is used everywhere to justify [the restriction of] First Amendment freedoms."
"It wouldn't bother me if there were no libel or slander laws. They infringe on free speech."
"The basic premise of the First Amendment is that people must be left to say their prayers in their own way, and to their own God, without express or explicit coercion from any political office holder. There are not many people with religion and intelligence who will think this constitutional principle wrong on mature second thought. To those who think prayer must be recited parrot-like in public places to be effective, the sixth chapter of Matthew, 1 to 19, might be reflected upon, particularly verses 5 through 8."
On Vietnam:
"It's immoral, our national interest isn't involved and the domino theory is silly."
"Vietnam is the worst thing that has ever happened to this country: it's insanity."
On Rexford Tugwell's nomination to undersecretary of agriculture:
In everything he has spoken, in every word he has uttered, we find him striking a sledge-hammer against inordinate profits, against long hours, against children in factories... I am not for Mr. Tugwell solely because the President has appointed him. I am for him because I think he represents a school of political thought of which the country has long been sorely in need... which will not deify money and property to the extent of adding to the destitution and human misery of the men, women and children of the United States who produce the wealth which the people themselves are entitled to have."
On national healthcare:
"I am firmly convinced that the health of the nation should be of national concern....Whether the betterment of national health can be worked out better by a system of national hospitals, or by a system of state and national health and accident insurance, nobody knows, but humanity and social justice demand that it must be studied -- it should also be studied from a viewpoint of national defense."
On Faith:
"I can't exactly believe, and I can't exactly not believe."
More jurisprudence:
"I am just old fashioned enough to believe that the Constitution means exactly what it says."
"The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach."
"The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional."
"Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against."
"The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands."
"I am not now, and have never been, a railroad, power company, or a corporation lawyer. I am not a millionaire."
[The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment's] first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion."
"Laws are made to protect the trusting as well as the suspicious."
"Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means you shall not do something to people for views they have, express, speak, or write."
"The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith."
"The time has passed for promises and plans to desegregate.. [the court's duty] is to extirpate all racial discrimination from our system of public schools NOW."
On famous jackasses:
[JFK as Senator] "hasn't done anything yet. Whatever he is, he is no liberal."
"Dear [Fellow Associate Justice] Bill [Douglas]: If they [Gerald Ford and Nixon's other cronies] try to impeach you, I'll resign [from the Supreme Court] and be your lawyer. I have one more hard trial left in me." (1970)
On Life and Education:
"It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self."
"I hope you can do some part of your college work outside the particular section in which you have been reared. This will subject you to ideas and habits quite new to you, broadening your intellectual horizons. People in each section of our great nation tend to have their ideas fashioned by their own immediate environments -- that is they become provincial in their thinking. A man with a good education shakes off this habit, learns that no person, group, or section has a monopoly on knowledge or truth, and then has a chance to live a wiser and happier life. In this connection you might get some good thoughts from the story of the cavemen which you can find in Plato's Republic Book VII."
Black overcame his racist upbringing. He was an autodidact of the best sort and of the kind that is the bete noire of Academe as well as the punditry. He believed in the New Deal and was sensitive to the corruption of previous Courts and pretty much made it his life mission to correct those corrupt decisions so that the Bill of Rights could apply to everyone as the Framers intended. He didn't win, but he did much good work. Hugo Black is a severely underappreciated American.
[Revised 5-8-07]
No, Where The Hell Have You Been?
Since my steady readership has grown from three to roughly a dozen, I feel that I owe an apology for not blogging the last few days.
Now, I could be truthful and say that this weekend was an important one in the RETARDOworld, and add that I had to go to the farm for a few days as well, but, in taking a page from the recognised
Masters, why should I tell the truth when it's much more fun to lie out my ass?
So, yeah... that's the ticket.
I was, uhh, at a blogging convention. Of course, it was held at a
top secret location; of course, only lefty bloggers were invited (the
Legion of Frum and their fuckin Darth Vader helmet-looking
spaceship are mortal enemies and need not apply).
Many of us attended. Progress was made. The catering was atrocious. Yes, someone took pictures: of
me,
General Glut,
Ms S.Z. of World O'Crap,
Roy of alicublog,
TBOGG,
Sully (foreground; and no, I don't know who invited him),
Pete M. Window (posing here, Atrios to the right),
Norbizness, and even the
entertaining but deeply troubled Dr. Sebly F. No graced us with his presence until he started to do things with ping-pong balls that taste forbids me to describe in greater detail.
Yes, the
entities of Fafblog "were" also "there". Others chipped-in their two cents, of course, but I'm running past deadline and so cant be expected to post pictures of everyone, though I will say that everyone is a superhero as well as one of Jesus's sweet sunbeams. But you knew that.
Anyway, what did we discuss and decide? Well, it goes without saying that the dialogue was shrill; it also goes without saying that I must keep much of it secret. But we did decide to persue further action on one front.
Forthwith, in the interest of saving precious bytes, not to mention the already atrophied American attention span, let the
awful rightwing
parents who commodify their children hereby establish a peer-to-peer network based on the "Gnatella" platform, thus facilitating a quick exchange of anonymous, blonde, completely imaginary kiddies via whom and with which these 'wingers can manufacture "whimsical" -- and massively implausible -- stories that without fail miraculously conform to the Ideal Republican Worldview.
This would solve a multitude of problems. For one, it would prevent the apparently real children from commiting matricide and/or patricide when they are grown enough to realise how they've been made pawns to an agenda, not to mention to creatively-bereft pundit-parents. I must admit that this benefit was seriously debated by our group, on the grounds that even though the childrens' dignity is something to be protected, who are we to intefere with what their (just) reactions would be ...?
For another, it would make it so that the fake children would have a back-story instantly known by all, readers and writers alike, therefore saving valuable time of both by allowing the author to get on with the ideological lecture, instead of burning up precious brain cells in creating the verisimilitude upon which fake anecdotes are founded.
We voted on the motion. The ayes won. There was much rejoicing. Norbizness said "enuk-chuck" and instantly added fifty feet to his height. I swear that several didn't hide the fact that they then stared up under his loincloth. Seb did the ping-pong thing. Fafnir transformed into a purple moose while Giblets became a giant ice dildo. Roy and I then commenced to rock the place to its foundations, 'cause we're cool like that. Yeah.
The Shorter National Review
Shorter Michael Ledeen:
George Will is neither reactionary nor revisionist historian enough to come to my sage conclusions on Iran.
I love how Ledeen uses South Africa and the Philippines as positive examples of Reaganite regime change. Clue to Mr Ledeen: Ronnie propped up those regimes.
Shorter Nadiya Kravets:
Russia's Single Economic Sphere is something Americans should fight, since S.E.S. is like a Far Eastern European version of NAFTA. Oh, wait..
More evidence of the creep of "American Exceptionalism" into conservative writing. Countries flexing economic muscles to influence neighbours are by nature evil -- unless it's America doing the flexing.
Shorter Jonah Goldberg:
Had the CBS memos been authentic, they wouldn't have been relevant.
Question for Lucianne, Jr: How the fuck can anything "faintly smack.. of collusion"?
Shorter Victor Hanson:
The 1960s, United Nations, PBS, Bill Clinton and Neville Chamberlain are all horrible, and Dan Rather is proof.
Hanson deserves some kind of award or title, perhaps "Most Convergent-Minded Reactionary Hack" for linking wingnuts' favourite targets from the last 60 years together in one column purportedly on the topic of Dan Rather's sins.
Shorter Byron York:
I dug up a better media scandal to compare to Dan Rather's than you guys could find.
Yeah,
Dateline:NBC. You didn't really expect him to mention John Stossel, did you?
Shorter Ramesh Ponnuru:
With Bush's Social Security Scheme, you don't have to worry about benefits as long as your privatised SS investments do well.
Shorter Document:
The PATRIOT Act rocks, and without it we'd have been attacked again like 9/11. So renew it, or we'll all die.
Demagogery sounds so much better when put in diplomat-speak.
Shorter Rich Lowry:
We'd win more states if it weren't for those meddling Latinos.
Lowry is educating the choir here, so to speak, and so to crack the intra-party code he employs I suggest the use of infrared-state goggles.
Shorter Denis Boyle:
I can provide 10,000 reasons to hate France, each less truthful than the one before it.
Boyle nicely uses total casualty figures of the UN-led French-supported mission in Congo to "rebutt" American military casualty figures in Iraq. It's also nice to see that Boyle finds the reactionary-credentials of Niall Ferguson (who is the most rightwing Briton around) wanting. I say "nice" because it provides us with essential information with which to place Mr Boyle on the ideological spectrum.
Shorter James S. Robbins:
My interpretation of the polls leads me to conclude that everything is peachy in Iraq, except for the socialistic answers Iraqis gave the pollsters on issues like health care.
Mr Robbins doesn't consider the possibility that those Iraqis who think their country is on the right track might think so
because of the insurgency. I also like the "aww, aren't they a bunch of sillies?" tone he adopts when trying to present the pro-socialist Iraqi answers to the NRO readership. Paternalism is a real laff-riot.
***From the Dept. Of Belated Footnotes:
Disclaimer: Shorter concept inspired by
busy, busy, busy from an idea by
D-Squared; disclaimer concept gleefully stolen from
Sadly, No!
The Terrible Twos
World O'Crap
reminds us that
TBOGG recently had a birthday.
Helpfully, she also provides a photos of the rogues gallery that largely comprises TBOGG's html dartboard.
I hope
they look forward to the terrible twos as much as I do.
To steal a phrase, may his targets cower.
Cultural Commissars
Roy at the superb
alicublog makes several salient points on Brent
"Youppi" Bozell and his clones in specific terms, and on Conservative art criticism, in general.
Brent Bozell clone Tim Graham announces that "giving Emmy awards to 'Angels in America' is transparently political and anti-religious." Boy, I don't know why the nets don't turn their Emmy beat over to the guys from Fox and Friends -- soapbox cranks on awards shows are a barrel of laffs!
Even laffier, not to mention taffier, are the linked ravings of the original Bozell on Angels in America: "Artistically," he bravely begins, "it's a sprawling mess... a parade of blasphemy and profanity, a concerto of conservative-bashing... It’s exactly what playwrights and actors love – self-consciously writerly, intellectually preening, over-emoting..." Oh, and "Theologically, it’s even worse." Just in case you thought theatre criticism was Bozell's only stock in trade.
Part of the problem with these guys on art, any art, is that they confuse John Simon's old Tonight Show appearances with Hazlitt and Dr. Johnson. They think dyspepsia and outrage are criticism. And they think ideology is an artistic standard.
Of course I think all this is pretty much spot-on, with a small caveat we discuss in the entry's comments (Roy agrees that Simon's critiques do not draw from quite the same toxic mudpuddle as Bozell & Co.'s), and upon which I'd like to elaborate.
Bozell and his kind are this country's equivalent to the old Soviet apparatchiks: they don't know a fucking thing about art and only write criticism to enforce the party line. I'll steal from
Hitchens to make my point; Hitch's target here is the much-dread Norman Podhoretz, who is virtually identical to Bozell in motive, method, and "taste". First Hitch quotes The Pod's book
Ex-Friends:
When on a visit of my own to Prague in 1988 I was taken to meet Vaclav Havel,...the first thing that hit my eye upon entering his apartment was a huge poster of John Lennon hanging on the wall. Disconcerted, I tried to persuade Havel that the counterculture in the West was no friend of anti-communists like himself, but I made even less of a "dent" on him than [Allen] Ginsberg had made on me thirty years earlier.
Now to explain...
The above anecdote occurs in the chapter on Allen Ginsberg, the most recently dead of Podhoretz's exes...Podhoretz thinks that Ginsberg was a serious and gifted poet, that his views on family and society were destructive, and that (great wailing walls of glossy video in every heterosexual pornography shop notwithstanding) anal sex is something that facinates only homosexuals. The last point is an obsessive one in the neo-conservative school, incidentally...
[...]
The Russian exile writer Vassily Aksyonov...once wrote that Podhoretz reminded him of all the things he had left the Soviet Union to escape. He had, said Aksyonov, the mentality of a cultural commissar. As the Ginsberg essay demonstrates, he has the soul of one as well. And the literary sensitivity and imagination: most of the chapters here are regurgitated in great chunks from previous jeremaids such as Making It and Breaking Ranks
Hitch then goes on to quote The Pod slagging Norman Mailer, in two different books, which are identical save for a single careful revision that "shows", well..
This is not just boring and tenth-rate. It is sinister. Like Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's literary enforcer, Podhoretz doesn't content himself with saying that a certain novelist is no longer in favour or no longer any good. That would be banal. No, it must be shown that he never was any good, that he always harboured the germs of anti-party feeling, that he was a rank rodent from the get-go. Then comes the airbrush, the rewritten entry in the encyclopaedia, the memory hole. But even Zhdanov's hacks would have made the effort to employ some new phrases and new disclosures.
This works just as well on Bozell, Medved, Derbyshire,
Adesnik, et al. But it doesn't, as Roy ultimately agrees, apply in the same way to
John Simon.
Consider this recent review of Simon's in
New York magazine:
The culture project, which gave us the valuable prison documentary The Exonerated, now offers Guantánamo: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,” about British citizens detained at Guantánamo and the injustice and brutality prevailing there.
[...]
...Guantánamo is both too short to cover all aspects of the problem and too long for audiences impatient with so much talk and minimal action: Chairs and cots can constrain dramatic development. Ultimately, too, excess worthiness can be as anesthetizing as excessive wordiness.
Still, it is needful to be reminded that the United States and Britain can be just as unjust, as inhuman, as our most despised and detested enemies. And under the joint direction of Nicolas Kent (at whose London Tricycle Theatre the show originated) and Sacha Wares, physically of necessity static but emotionally moving, a deserving dozen actors perform with unexaggerated intensity and whatever humor can be squeezed out of horrid circumstances.
I submit that one is unable to find such fairmindedness in anything written by the commissars mentioned above. In fact, were they to review this docu-drama, I'd wager that all of them, to a man, would manage to work into their "criticism" some sort of doubt that the matters dramatised actually happened, and/or that the matters dramatised are exaggerated. The directors and producers would be suspected of hating America. The word "propaganda" would be forcefully employed. The object of the exercise (the Party Line) thus served, the aesthetic value of the flick would then be addressed, if at all, by a few tacked-on banalities.
It's true that Simon's a homophobe; it's also true that he's a cultural reactionary. But he writes excellent English, has a legitimate aesthetic, and without fail displays knowledge of his subjects. All of this makes him unlike the commissars, as does his adherence, this
wounding, flagrant piece notwithstanding, to the rule of art criticism: as much as possible, critique the art not the artist; but if you must critique the artist, be honest about it. Moreover, in art criticism the value of the art is not wholly determined by the ideology of its creator, nor indeed by the ideology of the work itself.
I admit that our side too has problems with this -- for instance, in the movement to ban Mark Twain from schools because he used the word "nigger" -- but misguided PC can't hold a candle to the Right's commissars. Hell, I can admit that
Anthem is a fine little novella by all measures, as a for instance. But most commissars are still trying to find new ways to slag the
The Grapes Of Wrath (don't get them started on
Ten Days That Shook The World) while at the same time trying to deal with all the smutty pinko homo atheistic messages they percieve in contemporary art.
In a sense it
is a culture war. Bozell and clones desire an art world that is ideologically pure. Art of course would then go out the window, but that's no concern to those who are
intrinsically artless anyway.
Update:
Matthew Yglesias observes the same phenomenon.
Update 2/5/05:
Wolcott evicerates Harry Stein's fawning review of Commisar Medved's self-pitying memoir, and correctly notes that The Pod's persecution complex is the original template upon which so many Far-Right Kulturkampfers have based their style.
The United States of Florida
Fuckola. It's bad. Real bad. Read it.
Thanks to poly for the link.
***
Completely unrelated, but go
here and watch Peter Jennings (!) catch Bush lying. I would say that the press is starting to do their jobs but I know better. Still, this is a pleasant aberration.
That Blow Shit Up Part Of Wilsonism Rocks, But The Self-Determination Part Is A Real Downer
Roger L. Simon gets major wood over Max Boot's
latest column in the
L.A. Times.
A better appraisal of Boot's argument can be found at
Busy Busy Busy.
I won't go so far as to say that it is clever of Boot and his fellow neoconmen to claim "Wilsonian" heritage, but I will say that it's paid dividends, if only because most of his fellow pundits are too stupid to catch the lie.
In fact, even some
"liberals" are quite taken by Boot's sophistry.
In practice, what Boot advocates is more like
this, which merely underlines the truth that neocon foriegn policy is cobbled from Theodore "No triumph of peace is quite as great as the supreme triumph of war!" Roosevelt,
not Woodrow Wilson.
But you don't have to listen to Rummy, Cheney, and Wolfowitz ever occasionally and always accidentally tell the truth about their schemes. Just listen to
Michael "Americans are a warlike people who love war" Ledeen a while, or to Krauthammer, Brooks, Podhoretz, Paul Johnson, Frum, et al. Boot's no different, he's just slightly better at Public Relations, at least in his newspaper essays.
The real Boot is to be found in his turgid homage to Rooseveltian imperialism, the oxymoronically-titled
The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, where he takes care to mention the
Anti-Imperialist League, founded by genuine dissidents and intellectuals (rather than by bogus dissidents and intellectuals, which neocons have always been) only once, and apparently then only to dismiss them as isolationist "mugwumps"; perhaps he's taking a cue from TR whose "genius" he admiringly quotes condemning "flapdoodle pacifists and mollycoddlers."
It's true that Boot legitimately finds things that only a neocon can admire in Wilson:
General John J. Pershing personally led more than 10,000 soldiers deep into Mexico in persuit of Villa and his band. The punitive expedition almost sparked a second war between the U.S. and Mexico, but it was good training for World War I. (My Emphasis.)
and certainly Wilson's nearly-instantaneous breaking of his promise to keep America out of WWI (which is what elected him, after all), brings forth a smile from the
pursed machiavellian lips of the average neocon, not to mention a gasp of ecstasy.
But what made and makes Wilsonism different from TR's foriegn policy, and indeed from that of the neoconmen, is its emphasis on self-determination. Ho Chi Minh, as a young man, was present at Versailles and was inspired by Wilson's rhetoric -- inspired to fight for self-determination of the Vietnamese, and thus to fight against the Japanese and French imperialists. Alas, as Eisenhower famously noted in his diaries, when it was America's turn to be imperialist menace to Vietnam it was because good United Statesmen couldn't tolerate a socialist, and legitimate, democracy in Southeast Asia. Thus we nicely drove Ho into the arms of Stalinist commies, and quite lost what remained of our souls in doing so.
Ho, of course, wasn't the only one inspired by Wilson -- one could point to Nehru, Nasser, Julius Nyerere; several who sought self-determination and a "third way", which naturally the US and the Soviets made a preciously difficult task. Where Wilsonism prudently aims to aid revolutions/reconstructions from below (and thus employs "consent"), TR and the neocons aim for revolutions/deconstructions (or, to be more historically accurate, counter-revolutions) from above, a dynamic that quite bluntly underlines the fact that its advocates don't give a flying fuck what the particular country's citizens desire, but instead rather heavy-handedly assumes what would be best
for the meddling power for the inhabitants. One doesn't
need Habermas's ponderous
explanations to realise that this very model is about as anti-democratic in spirit as one can be. More to the point, it's rarely practical.
No one likes to be invaded, occupied, and then be forced to accept a government imposed by a foriegn power.
The true analogue to the neocon version of world order, specifically with regard to the Middle East, is not Vietnam (though I admit the domino theory of both is telling), but the Spanish-American War. Both were inspired by dubious "threats", both were presented as crusades for freedom, as liberations from autocracy. Both produced reprehensible behaviour in the press. Both were prosecuted with a demagogic undercurrent of racism, tribalism, and sectarianism. Behind both were "Vulcans" who had clear strategic and materialist aims, but who necessarily had to keep these aims quiet while letting the politicos bloviate about "freedom" and "liberation" which it would prove that few among them were actually willing to give to the affected peoples. The parallels are
obvious.
The Project for the New American Century is, in effect, the voice of so many
Admiral Mottis who tell Bush that the American Military is the ultimate power in the universe and that they suggest its deliberate use, ASAP. With 9/11 came qualified consent from the masses, which the neocons and their President promptly and inevitably abused. This, too, is analogous to the Spanish-American War, in which the US, after promising self-determination to the Filipinos, quickly welched on the deal, inspiring a rebellion which was incredibly bloody and then a "pacification", which Boot predictably glosses over, that was unequivocally genocidal. Iraq has not reached this level -- yet. But the "Heart of Darkness" level has been reached, thank you very much: Abu Ghraib is to Iraq what the "water cure" was to the Philippines. One can only wonder what
General Taguba thinks in his quiet moments.
But Kevin Drum is not the only "liberal" who is pleased to be, so to speak, under Boot's heel. When people like, say, Tariq Ali rightly suspected that motives for going into Iraq were less-than-pure, one senses that if the "liberals" listened at all, they only did so long enough to roll their eyes and then quickly click to
The New Republic to read the latest justifications. I'm sorry to say that
several of them, to the extent that they looked for historical analogues to the Iraq Operation, went no farther than reading about the recent history they'd lived through, like the Balkan War, which is something of a historical and geopolitical duckbilled platypus. That was that, and so they signed up. This is understandable and forgivable of young bloggers like the Pandagon guys and Matthew Yglesias, but less so for Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum, to name two who should have known better. But then with the exception of the Pandagon guys, these bloggers aren't very "liberal" at all, but actually "centrist", a euphemism for the softly conservative.
Still, they are all coming around, in fits and starts. Yglesias sees
a part of the historical analogy, but is still apparently blind to the rest of it. Now that
The New Republic"s John Judis has written a book comparing the "petulant unilateralism" of Bush to that of TR,
Josh Marshall has grasped the obvious, though it doesn't quite excuse his long-held belief in Recieved Opinion on Theodore Roosevelt -- as if there were not
alternative analyses all along. That leaves Drum, who concedes the folly of Iraq but still finds the likes of Boot -- as opposed to naughty lefties like Robert Scheer -- to be "persuasive". Yeah, well, either the ideology Boot peddles is sensible and moral or it's not; and one either agrees with it, or not. And that judgement begins by realising that Boot is not actually peddling Wilsonism.
Yay!
Greetings to readers of General Glut's excellent
globblog.
Comrade General obviously learned from the sad examples of
Pete and
Seb, both of whom I was forced to blackmail into linking to my site.
Fair warning, Globblog readers: My blog isn't nearly as good.
Another One Bites The Dust?
It looks like
Brett Marston has pretty much quit blogging, and though it doesn't bring me the joy that I felt when I heard that Milton Bradley had discontinued
Stratego, I do feel a certain relief -- for him.
He's too nice a guy to join in the current slugfest, yet he's too honest to go the Kristoff "It's not nice to call Bush a liar even if he is one!" route. Besides, anyone would get weary of constantly debating dissemblers like
Chafetz.
Actually, he mentions his circumstances have changed which explains his absence. I sincerely wish him the best.
In one of the rare recent posts, however,
he mentions that he still reads
Defective Yeti, an admittedly well-written blog with possibly the greatest logo/photo in the history of the blogsphere.
But I don't read it anymore. Its author is political -- though Marston is right to say that politics is not the thrust of the blog -- and what's more, to my mind his politics are excellent (progessive independent).
Which makes the Jonah Goldberg-love that much more mysterious.
But anyway, I'm not an
apparatchik; I quit reading the Yeti because it's so bobo, and I don't mean politically. The author is much more talented and much much less ..well, retarded than Lileks, but I still see bleating as the blog's ultimate future: domesticity, suburbanism ..boring. Not that it's bad, it's just not interesting to me.
But then I originally read the Yeti for the
movie reviews.
So long, Brett; and you too, albino Chewbacca.
The Only Hope For Democracy Are People Like Me!
Kristoff is still at it:
The only hope for stopping the mudslinging is if well-meaning people try to police their own side.
If they're intellectually consistent, Democrats will speak out not only against the Swift Boat Veterans but also against Mr. Kerry's demagoguery on trade, like his suggestion that outsourcing is the result of Mr. Bush's economic policies. Trade demagoguery may not be as felonious as an assault on a war hero's character, but it harms America by undermining support for free trade.
Yes yes,
that's even-handedness. Hack.
We Had To Remove The Village's Kidneys In Order To Save It
Thomas Sowell is right. I mean, just read about these
plucky Nepalese villagers whose kidney sales have not only crippled the nanny state Nepalese government, but serve as an entreprenurial beacon unto others.
More Crazy & Stupid Than Crazy & Stupid
I've thought for
a while now that the fucktardious nutbars who inhabit Roger L. Simon's blog are about as crazy as people can be without going the whole clown shoes/eye twitch/rainbow wig/loaded rifle in the belltower route.
In other words, almost as crazy and stupid as freepers. But now, with ol' Roger's help, they've
outdone themselves. If freepers wear tinfoil hats, Simonites are mummified in Reynolds Wrap; if freepers are barely human, Simonites are barely simian:
Soro really should look at who he's currently financing. Many of them are true believer in the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nevermind that it's been proven to be a forgery, it's the content of the forgery that counts.
How come no one ever talks about the Netherlands Antilles? It's the place where his hedge fund is located...it's also the place where drug cartels launder their money and intl. online gaming companies are based. It's also completely shielded from external scrutiny. Why is this not commmented on more thoroughly?
George Soros is a very shady character who has avery ambiguous history. There are those who think he was being groomed as Armand Hammer's replacement by the KGB in the 1980s. Some people, like LGEN Sir Michael Rose, believe they have identified connections with the CIA.
Like his support for Eastern European democracy George Soros is a Jew when it suits him.
I am more focused on the havoc a bozo like Sorros has on society and especially my people and I'll repeat it drives me nuts! Some of the worst anti-Semites have been and are Jews. Turning on your own kind and even against your own interests, is one of the weirder elements exhibited in nature and I view Sorros in that light. Also remember many Jews in Europe walked to slaughter without even fighting! THAT IS WHAT THIS JEW (ME) WILL NEVER DO!
The answer for the average Russian was he was a Soviet era KGB creation. Soros fits a similar pattern. The question is what happened to these people once the Soviet Union fell apart?
If you think Soros hates his fellow Jews you should shudder at what he thinks of East European Christians:
Regarding "women's health" programs in Central and Southeastern Europe, for instance, one will look in vain for breast-cancer detection or prenatal or postnatal care. Soros' main goal is clear and frankly stated: "to improve the quality of abortion services."
Of course all of it is pure drivel. But I confess I do like the Armand Hammer theory: wingnuts quite forget that Hammer gave money to Nixon/Ford/Reagan but instead remember that he was far too cozy with the Soviets, and pretty much bankrolled Al Gore, Sr's later years.
The wingnuts hate Soros obviously because he gives money to anti-Bush organisations. But it's more than that. He's for drug-legalisation, which pisses off those Republican puritans who otherwise preach so much about personal freedom. He's against both far left and far right subversions of democracies, which pisses off the not-so-closeted theocrats and tribalists of rightwing, who quite like it that Bush claims to chat policy issues with Jesus and who also think that anything Ariel Sharon does or has ever done is okey fucking dokey. I also suspect that, as a pragmatic capitalist he, like Warren Buffett, thinks capitalism can put itself in danger by being too callous, which may eventually inspire a revolution from the other side. He doesn't like Israel's ongoing Manifest Destiny programme. And perhaps worst of all, Soros
explodes the rightwing meritocratic myth that considers financial/CEO types Brainiacs whose rare intellects make them so deserving of their scandalous salaries:
Soros didn't accept the prevailing theory among economics professors, who held that markets are rational, that prices reflect every nuance of hard data and relevant information. He believed that investors influenced one another and moved in herds. Soros' trick was to try to understand that herd instinct. Most of the time he went along with the mob, but his real killings came from sensing when the trend would turn and getting out in front of the pack.
And how could he tell the timing of the crucial turning points? Like other investors, Soros had colleagues gather information and perform analyses. But he also had an extraordinary gut. He said that he would have an instinctive physical reaction about when to buy or sell. Normally his composure was cool and emotionless, but when he suffered from a bad backache, he took it as an ominous warning about problems in the market. "I used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio," he once explained. "I rely a great deal on animal instincts."
Instinct. I expect that doesn't sit well with wingnuts who make a habit of sneering at the "stupid" poor and leftists. It's also worth noting that Soros, to his credit, wished to follow Karl Popper into political philosophy, but couldn't cut it and so had to settle for finance, where he became a master by
not paying a dime's worth of attention to the "science" of it.
(Via
TBOGG.)
*Edit --cleaned up some punctuation.
More Of This, Please
Kerry's Speech.
The principles that should guide American policy in Iraq now and in the future are clear: We must make Iraq the world’s responsibility, because the world has a stake in the outcome and others should share the burden. We must effectively train Iraqis, because they should be responsible for their own security. We must move forward with reconstruction, because that’s essential to stop the spread of terror. And we must help Iraqis achieve a viable government, because it’s up to them to run their own country. That’s the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.
On May 1 of last year, President Bush stood in front of a now infamous banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” He declared to the American people: “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” In fact, the worst part of the war was just beginning, with the greatest number of American casualties still to come. The president misled, miscalculated, and mismanaged every aspect of this undertaking and he has made the achievement of our objective – a stable Iraq, secure within its borders, with a representative government, harder to achieve.
In Iraq, this administration’s record is filled with bad predictions, inaccurate cost estimates, deceptive statements and errors of judgment of historic proportions.
At every critical juncture in Iraq, and in the war on terrorism, the President has made the wrong choice. I have a plan to make America stronger.
The President often says that in a post 9-11 world, we can’t hesitate to act. I agree. But we should not act just for the sake of acting. I believe we have to act wisely and responsibly.
George Bush has no strategy for Iraq. I do.
George Bush has not told the truth to the American people about why we went to war and how the war is going. I have and I will continue to do so.
I believe the invasion of Iraq has made us less secure and weaker in the war against terrorism. I have a plan to fight a smarter, more effective war on terror – and make us safer.
Today, because of George Bush’s policy in Iraq, the world is a more dangerous place for America and Americans.
He and Edwards should say this all day, everyday, until the election.
Not only is all this sensible, and all his accusations true, but the effect is that
Bush is dazed by this kind of punch. The moron's quick to anger and easily rattled, which neatly intensifies his notoriously inept and incoherent rebuttals. So rattle him more, please. And the sooner will steam roll from his ears as he babbles buh buh buh buh and, hopefully, says something that leaves the centers and undecideds scandalised.
**Update:
Bush didn't take the advice:
We did not expect President Bush to come before the United Nations in the middle of his re-election campaign and acknowledge the serious mistakes his administration has made on Iraq. But that still left plenty of room for him to take advantage of this one last chance to appeal to an increasingly antagonistic world to help the Iraqis secure and rebuild their shattered nation and prepare for elections in just four months. Instead, Mr. Bush delivered an inexplicably defiant campaign speech in which he glossed over the current dire situation in Iraq for an audience acutely aware of the true state of affairs, and scolded them for refusing to endorse the American invasion in the first place.
When "I'm Surrounded By Poles!" Is Not The Punchline To A Lame Gay Joke
(Not that all gay jokes are lame, though the best are often
inadvertent.)
My former roommate and good friend, whose family has been incredibly nice to me for some reason through the years, is Polish-American. My current roommate's in-laws are Polish-Americans. My own S.O. is Polish and has tried, with remarkably little success entirely due to my density, to teach me the Polish language. In the last few years I learned that the man who built my house, my great great grandfather, came to America from Koenigsburg/Kaliningrad and may have been ethnicly Polish.
For such reasons and others, I occasionally read Polish News online. And so far as current geopolitical realities go, it's good to try to keep up with what's going on there.
It's also nice to read plain-spoken journalism larded with honesty, wit, and sarcasm -- no matter the country of origin (though it goes without saying that it isn't likely those qualities can be found in articles of American origin).
Stuff like this:
The slight tinge of cosmopolitanism characteristic of the president meets with resistance from groups attached to traditional Polish values. Brussels was recently visited by a delegation of local government officials from Gliwice in Silesia. The mission caused a conflict. The opposition claimed Gliwice county’s promotional budget had been severely depleted as a result. The delegates replied they had taken Poland’s age-old treasures as promotional items to Brussels: kie?basa and vodka.
The Catholic rightists are being touchy about Poland’s international image. The Polish Season in France included a report from the famous festival of Jewish culture in Cracow. The high-circulation Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik hit the nail on the head. “As its name clearly says, the Season was supposed to show Polish, not Jewish, culture,” the paper condemned wasting of public money to promote filthy mayufes instead of the beautiful and pure mazurka.
Making sure Poland stays in international headlines is Nasz Dziennik’s favorite, ex-chaplain of Solidarity, Prelate Henryk Jankowski. He’s in trouble because prosecutors are investigating whether accusations that he molested minors are true. Father Jankowski had no doubts as to whose doing this is and has said so: he is the victim of a Judeo-Communist conspiracy. Since the Judeo-Commies are rife in the media, a crowd of pious Poles battered a Polsat television reporter hanging around Father Jankowski’s church in Gda?sk. The police did not intervene, and the bizarre shabbos-goy from Polsat ran screaming to the prosecutors to complain about the behavior of the true Poles.
Gda?sk was prominent in the world media in times that were better for Father Jankowski, in August 1980, when Lech Wa??sa’s Solidarity was founded. Recently Gda?sk’s rightists motioned that the city’s central traffic circle be named after Ronald Reagan. According to his Gda?sk fans, Reagan was the man who made August 1980 possible. The only problem is, Reagan became president five months after the great August events.
There’s lots that divides the Poles, but some things unite them.
For example, a fondness for storks. In Poland, this large and heavy bird is a symbol of fertility and that’s the direction Poles should be going in. If Poland wants to dominate in the united Europe in accordance with its new constitution, by November 2009 it has to have produce 250 million new citizens. The appeal from Fakt daily, which published these calculations, was immediately answered by true Polish mothers: “We are prepared to give birth to children for Poland.” Europe beware, the Poles are coming.
There are other things to unite the Poles. Every seventh Polish man wears a mustache. This makes Poland the absolute leader in Europe, because only every 50th German and 400th effeminate Frenchman has a mustache.
A nation whose soccer players lose to Denmark one to five, and are out of breath running to get the morning paper, has to be best at something goddammit.
Mmmmm, that's some good writin'. By a Pole, who has taken great pains not to be a nationalist pig.
Every stupid aspect of his countrymen is neatly skewered. Now it's true that Americans occasionally write things like this about other Americans, which in turn is sometimes accidentally published in mainstream media, but it's rare indeed when an American is so damning of so many of his culture's idiocies and that American is not in turn demonised for "freedom-hating", the pinko crypto self-loathing American cutdown that's the classic shortcut-to-thinking for the Right. You know it well...
So what did I learn from this article? That Poland has a great many religious nuts who are pretty much openly anti-semites. Well, yeah. That many Poles, even among the elite, are parochial nitwits. That the Polish rightwing has nearly the same firm purchase on historical fact as America's wingnuts, and that they too think very mythologically of Ronald Reagan. That the Polish Catholic priests have a problem with the same perversions as America's. That Poles intend to breed as incontinently as the average Kennedy. That Polish men have a late 70s American porn star's habit with facial hair. And last but not least, that Poles are out of shape and have a shitty soccer team.
This sounds exactly like the red states in which I live. But then I already knew that: "Josh, Polish men are like the rednecks of Europe -- only Russians are worse!"
I believe it. Welcome to the Ozarks. Mowie po polsku?
The Band of Brothers Hates America
Via
Atrios, I see that a poster at
Kos catches
Grover "Income tax = The Holocaust" Norquist letting the cat out of the bag:
"Yes, because in addition their demographic base is shrinking. Each year, 2 million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exeception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies. They voted for the creation of the welfare state and obligatory military service. They are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying. And, at the same time, all the time more Americans have stocks. That makes them defend the interests of business, because it is their own interest. Because of that, it's impossible to bring to the fore policies of social hate, of class warfare."
This is no doubt shocking to garden variety True Democrats, who probably go on to think that Norquist is just an extremist. Such an analysis is true, but Norquist
isn't, actually, extreme for a modern Republican.
Come on. Picture if a future Democratic President, post-Iraq, tries (not that he will) to put through programmes identical to the New Deal, and all at once. One can well imagine the squeals of anguish from the typical
super-reactionaries of the right, as well as from the
conservatarians and
legitimate libertarians. This is to be expected.
But you'd also hears squeals from the "center", which is what soft conservatives or Rockefeller Republicans are now known as. I believe I am under no illusion in thinking that Drum, Yglesias and probably even Brad DeLong would be "suspicious" or "unpersuaded" by the sort of "socialism" that produces masterpieces like the TVA.
So Norquist, insane though he may be, is right
in a sense: the genuine Democratic base, which
does not regard the New Deal as socialist authoritarianism, is dying out. And it's being replaced by people who should be, in a system where parties were labeled honestly with regard to ideology, mild Republicans. It's a sorry state indeed, but then nearly 40 years of far-right hegemony (only briefly interrupted by the softly liberal Carter and the objectively conservative Clinton) will have that effect. Our work's cut out for US.
**Update: More Grover follies collected
here.
No Mercy
You know what?
Fuck you, Sully.
[Jimmy Swaggart] then goes on about those politicians who defend gay rights and dignity: "They all ought to marry a pig, and live with it forever... And I thank God that president Bush has stated that we need a constitutional amendment that says marriage is between a man and a woman." (Swaggart also claims he has nothing against "the poor homosexual." He'll just kill one if he gets a chance.) Watch this broadcast and see the forces that this president is riding toward victory on.
Yes, this is Bush's base; yes, Jimmy Swaggart is a detestable person. But do you really think Jimmy Swaggart has ever changed or ever will? Do you think his homophobia and political allegiances have altered in the least bit in, say, the last thirty years? He's
always been like that. And he's
always represented the Republican base. But then
you have always been until now just another crusty coprolite left behind the elephants at so many GOP homo-hating parades.
How on fucking earth could you not know that these people have always detested who you are? You came to conservatism in, what, 1984 or so? At any rate you've partaken in unqualified cheerleading for the Republican party for at least 20 years, and as such, you
had to have known its true nature.
It's not like Teddy Kennedy ever tolerated professional homophobes like
Anita Bryant, but Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sure as fuck did. It's not like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts and Ralph Reed ever said a kind thing or offered any support for Mondale, Dukkakis, and Clinton, but they sure as fuck did for Reagan, Bush, Dole and now Bush II.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Racism and homophobia were institutionalised in the Republican Party after the Barry Goldwater schism post-'64, when the traditionally tolerant (and in some ways, liberal) Rockefeller Republicans were put out to pasture. This effect can't be blamed on Goldwater himself, who was a sort of civil libertarian, but upon his heirs Ronald Reagan (with regard to homophobia) and Richard Nixon (with regard to "Southern Strategy" racism).
Neither is the "intellectual" branch of the GOP blameless: neoconservatives have always believed that homosexuality destroys "manly" virtues like
jingoism patriotism, and that it subverts religion, which is what binds the masses in a sort of "ethical" docility. Now I'm sure a habitual Strauss apologist like the much-dread
Chafetz will deny it, but the fact is that this was the view of Leo Strauss.
Most, I think, are aware that
Allan "Woodstock = Nuremberg" Bloom, who functioned as a bridge, as it were, from Strauss to Krauthammer, Boot, Fukuyama, Kirkpatrick, et al, died of AIDS, and the neoconservatives tried for quite a while after to hide this fact out of embarassment and --yes-- shame. Their ideology demanded that they held back from bestowing any sort of posthumous sympathy on their comrade, much less become open to any kind of reappraisal of their values.
Anyone could see then how neocons treated their own (who was admittedly closeted but who also was a notorious race-baiter, and as such had his own double-standards to ponder along with his apostacy to Straussian dogma), and so could, provided that they were not lobotomised or willfully blind, determine the extent of their sympathies for "regular" homosexuals.
You have no fucking excuse for just coming round to seeing what has been painfully obvious to everyone else for years. The Republican Party, as a rule, hates gay people. Are you really that slow on the uptake, Sully? I rather doubt it. And so I'm thinking, your tolerance for "Derbyshire award winners" is actually rather higher than most people's. So either you're stupid, or you're cynical and potentially opportunistic. Which is it?
**Update : Even disinfopedia links to a
Bloom bio that still wrongly describes the nature of Bloom's final illness.
***Update 2: It should be obvious that this post is mostly just a pathetic attempt to get
SullyWatch to notice me.
****Update 3: Yay! It
worked!
Crime And Punishment
"
Crime":
Venezuela's electoral authorities say an audit of the vote on President Hugo Chavez's rule found no proof of fraud.
"The results of the audit were very positive... allowing us to turn the page," said National Electoral Council director Jorge Rodriguez.
Mr Chavez won 59% of the vote in the 15 August poll, sparking claims of vote-rigging from the opposition, who refused to take part in the review.
It is the third time that international observers have endorsed the result.
The audit was carried out by the Venezuelan National Electoral Council and international observers from the Carter Center and the Organization of American States (OAS).
Mitigating Factor ONE:
Chavez, rightly, says "Fuck you, gringos."
Mitigating Factor TWO:
The US has tended to avoid direct criticism of President Chavez, whose country is a major oil supplier.
Result:
he Bush administration's decision to stop supporting $250 million in loan requests that Venezuela has before international financial institutions has gone virtually unnoticed. Yet, by invoking such sanctions now, Washington risks making another mistake in dealing with Venezuela's mercurial strongman, President Hugo Chávez.
In announcing its decision earlier this month, the White House cited Venezuela's role in the international trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation. The administration deserves credit for making this issue a high priority.
There are, however, serious questions about the motives behind the decision. The trafficking rationale seems particularly odd.
Conclusion: You're not a democracy unless you're for sale, and at our price. Also, being a friend to the poor and letting your petrodollars fuel infrastructure and education projects instead of lining the pockets of
our campaign contributors foreign investors and multinationals really pisses US off. For another thing, never meet Castro or say a nice word to him; it tends to
piss off a valued constituency. If
Nixon II Bush II wins in November, and you haven't cleaned your act up, we may have to give you the "
Allende" treatment.
"
Crime":
SANA’A - After much delay, Prime Minister Abdul-Qader Bajammal on Wednesday announced the cancellation of the oil deal concerning the sale of the state’s share of oil in Block 53, in the Governorate of Hadhramaut.
See also
here,
here, and general background
here.
Mitigating Factor ONE:
SANAA: Yemen’s army on Friday killed an anti-US Muslim preacher who styled himself as a "Prince of Believers" and led a near three-month bloody rebellion against the authorities from the mountainous north of the country. The defence and interior ministries said in a joint statement that the death of Sheikh Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi had brought the deadly rebellion to an end and that all military operations in the vast Saada province near the border with Saudi Arabia had now ceased.
Mitigating Factor TWO:
A Muslim cleric fighting extradition to the United States has been remanded in custody after appearing before magistrates by video link.
North London-based Abu Hamza al-Masri faces 11 terrorism-related charges, including involvement in the 1989 Yemen kidnapping in which three Britons died.
Mitigating Factor THREE:
Verdict on USS Cole suspects Sept. 29, US wants justice
The Penal Court concerned with crimes of terrorism decided to pass the verdict against the USS Cole suspects on September 29th, while the suspects still deny the accusations against them of involvementments in terrorist attacks, claiming they were subjected to torture.
Bonus Points:
‘Yemeni socialists backed rebel leader’
SANAA: The Yemeni government said yesterday that a rebel preacher from a minority Shiite Muslim sect who was killed by the army last week had been receiving help from parties outside Yemen.
Result:
Robert Hindle, the World Bank’s Country Manager based in Sanaa said that Yemen is demanded to do much more in its economic reforms. He emphasized that the World Bank could not continue providing the same level of funding and assistance, if the country did not implement the necessary reform measures needed and agreed upon.
See also
here.
Conclusion: We've
"altered the deal; pray we don't alter it any further." Or, put another way, we don't like it when you prevent multinationals from
buying your resources for pennies investing in your petroleum industries, but if you persist in killing whom we want killed -- or in extradicting whom we wish extradicted -- then we'll let you off with a strong warning, this time. But stop that democracy shit, it's too expensive for US when you do that. You know, like with
Mossadegh. What did you say? Iraq?
Democracy? Bwahahahaha that was never the plan; we just had to replace the puppet. It happens from time to time. So shut up.
Stuff
Jack Shafer reveals himself as a hack in this
Slate tome attacking Lewis Lapham and Lapham's fears of conservative "non-profits", which Shafer laughs off as delusional and hypocritical. But what is more interesting is Shafer's tacit admission that he himself is a purveyor of Recieved Opinion, and that any editor who does not follow his example is an eccentric, unstable fool:
If Lapham finds right-wing ideas so uniformly bankrupt, "both archaic and bizarre," as he writes, why did he spend so much intellectual energy advancing them during his first tenure (1975-1981) as editor of Harper's? Lapham's piece anticipates those charges by noting that back then, "the magazine" (not the editor?) published articles by "authors later to become well-known apologists for the conservative creed, among them George Gilder, Michael Novak, William Tucker, and Philip Terzian. …" This is a deceptively short list considering the number of cons, neocons, free-thinkers, gold-bugs, and libertarians who contributed to the magazine. Lapham conspicuously neglects to name his onetime Washington Editor Tom Bethell, a supply-side touter and big-government critic who contributed at least a dozen stories about the budget, congressional pensions, welfare, the arts and politics, energy, the press, and other topics. Other Harper's writers who pitched right for Lapham the first include Ken Adelman, Paul Craig Roberts, Mark Lilla, Peter Brimelow, Lewis E. Lehrman (on bringing back the gold standard!), Michael Ledeen, Jude Wanniski, Norman Podhoretz (on appeasement!), Ben Wattenberg, and James Q. Wilson.
Harper's popularized so many right-wing economic and environmental ideas that Rob Stein might want to add another slide to his PowerPoint presentation naming Lapham an emeritus member of the conservative message machine.
I joke. But barely. I imagine that what drew Lapham to these writers was his taste for heresy—he's always loved starting fights on the playground and then bringing them back into the classroom. It's difficult to convey how unkosher these writers were in the late '70s, a time when liberal Democrats ruled Washington and the liberal establishment ran the media. Publishing contrary pieces gave Harper's an ecumenical edge because alongside the right-wing shit-stirrers, Lapham ran pieces by the brightest on the left—Richard J. Barnet, Edward Abbey, Andrew Hacker, George McGovern, Alexander Cockburn, Walter Karp, Michael Harrington, and William Shawcross, to name a few.
Well, that's quite a bit to digest. For one, the classic Nixon-Reagan talking point of late 70s "liberal media" hegemony is a real thigh-slapper, as opposed to the
intended joke in the text, which is a real cricket-chirper. But the gist here is that Lapham's virtue -- publishing a genuine variety of left and right -- is a sin in Shafer's eyes, because of course it's much better to print "centrist" (actually, soft conservative) orthodoxy like what is commonly found in Shafer's
Slate, whose general editorial line is yet another sorely-needed clone of
The New York Times.
There's much more here boiling above and beneath the surface -- Shafer's boss Michael Kinsley has had a long-going row with Lapham and one hopes that Shafer got a nice bonus on this month's check for his hachetry -- as well as in the opportunistic use of the Randian/Conservatarian sillies of
Reason's "gotcha moment", after which they immediately commenced to self-congratulatory backflips for "catching" Lapham accurately guessing at the Party Line at the Republican National Convention (as if there was ever any doubt -- look at the fucking platform!).
Anyway, great job, Shafer. I have no doubt there'll be a shiny new X-box under your Christmas tree this year, affixed card signed "Love, Michael."
***
Thanks to
Rodger A. Payne's excellent blog, I have learned that
Hesiod has come out of retirement, a pleasant surprise. If I had to place him, I'd say that Hesiod's most like Atrios: neither profound nor witty, but *extremely* resourceful, very "on the pulse", and, obviously when not retired, indefatigable.
***
I forget how I found this, but in
The New Yorker is a piece that underlines all that is wicked in America:
The New York Yankees and Republicans.
Then, in the Bronx, there’s the imperial George Steinbrenner, no master of nuance. Steinbrenner gave money to President Bush, and pleaded guilty long ago to funnelling cash illegally to Richard Nixon. (He was eventually pardoned by Ronald Reagan.) He might well be called a compassionless conservative. (Manager Joe Torre, a friend of Rudy Giuliani’s, is the compassionate one.) Or, as the Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy observed the other day, on the phone from Oakland, “There’s definitely kind of a Steinbrenner-Dick Cheney connection. They seem to be like-minded guys.” The Yankees resent the luxury tax that has been imposed so heavily on them by the commissioner’s office. Very Republican.
Of course it's not that simple (I'd say sabremetricians are becoming *very* "Republican" and that the Red Sox, too, are guilty of following the Robber Baron model). To his credit the author admits as much but is still to be commended for making the general argument, which is delicious if rather obvious. Still, he didn't connect the most glaring dots: that the Yankees and Republican governments penultimate similarity is in the fact that they are the biggest bullies in the histories of their respective fields.
***
A must-read companion piece to James Wolcott's series of
snappy blog entries on the Kitty Kelley book is Matt Taibbi's
latest:
Kelley's book is – unintentionally I think – a surprisingly tender portrait of a small, loyal group of vicious undead fiends, persevering against all odds in a world of the callous, uncomprehending living. Kelley does what no other writer to date has really done for the Bushes: she actually makes you admire them for their remarkable ability to remain consistently cold, calculating, predatory and unscrupulous in generation after generation after generation.
In one of the great laugh lines of this or any other biography, Kelley sums up the Bush charm by quoting (third-hand, mind you – there's that damn credibility thing again!) none other than Richard Nixon:
"The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversation with his friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the journalist's periodic lunches with Murray Kempton. Kempton had mentioned George Bush [Sr.], and according to Vidal, Nixon had responded: "Total light-weight. Nothing there – sort of person you appoint to things – but now that Barbara, she's something else again! She's really vindictive!" Vidal characterized the comment as 'the highest Nixonian compliment.'"
But then Richard Nixon hadn't met W.
[snip]
As a book, The Family will merely affirm the worst suspicions of both those who hate George Bush and those who hate the Evil New York Liberal Media. But a few people who aren't too fond of the president might just change their minds. If you are the kind of person who roots for the monster in horror movies, expect to come away from The Family as a devoted Bush fan.
Do read it all, it's very very good.
Kitty Update:
Read this. (Via
UncleHornHead.)
Another Kitty Update:
Here. (Via
Fagistan.)
Laff-riot
Atrios notes that
Ahnuld has hired a few recycled advisors, one of whom being Arthur Laffer, whose theories were embraced by Reagan who then went on to menace the populace with "voodoo economics".
This is important not just because of Schwartzeneggar, but because Bush/Cheney basically subscribe to the same stuff, hence huge deficits and minimal taxing on the rich and super-rich.
I've been reading in and out of Garry Wills's
Reagan's America the last few weeks, and I think it's useful to copy out the reference to Laffer:
...In his third year Carter did not respond to danger signs by pinching in an economy he could relax toward his November deadline the next year. As Emma Rothschild pointed out, he did many of the right things economically, but at the wrong time electorally.He added more jobs than Reagan would do in his first term, but his boom came in his first year while Reagan's came in his election year. Cumulatively, Americans would not be better off after four years of Reagan than they had been after four years of Carter; but Reagan's recession hurt his party only in the congressional elections, and was forgotten by his own race, when recovery had begun...
There were deeper problems than surface manipulataion could deal with, and Reagan's campaign addressed these. Not only was there runaway inflation in the Carter years...But the Seventies brought simultaneous inflation and stagnation, defying conventional economic prescriptions...There was little agreement among the experts.
So the amateurs took over. Several editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal--Robert Bartley, Jude Wanniski, Paul Roberts--had beome enthusiasts for the ideas of a weirdly persuasive academic showman named Arthur Laffer. The Laffer theorem was as least as old as Montesquieu, and beyond challenge in itself--the claim that tax revenues can be so high as to dry up their source. Wanniski had Laffer explain this to one of President Ford's aides (who must have been rather dense) by drawing an igloo shape on a napkin to explain the trajectory of tax returns. The drawing was not only simplistic but tendentious--a lopsided igloo, or one melting to collapse in one direction would better describe the irregularities of the curve. Yet, from Jude Wanniski's unparalleled publicity campaign, built around this doodle, the mystique of supply-side economics grew.
[...]
There was much in the supply-side analysis to appeal to Ronald Reagan. It trusted the market, distrusted government, and believed in growth. But when Jude Wanniski tried to get a hearing from the Reagan camp in 1976, he was not successful. John Sears stood in the way. Reagan had already fallen for a "funny money" speech from Jeff Bell, and Sears wanted no more risky departures from the Republicans' earlier loves--the "old-time religion" of a balanced budget, or Milton Friedman's monetary policy. But by 1980 Sears was looking for something new in the era of stagflation, something that sounded aggressive and hopeful, to strike a contrast with Carter's economic stance...By that time Laffer's views had been adopted by congressional Republicans who supported the Kemp-Roth tax cut, and Sears encouraged Congressman Jack Kemp to travel with Reagan, to change his mood as well as his views, stimulating him with Kemp's own hot-gospeler's belief...
[...]
[David] Stockman promised to give Reagan's dream the substance of things countable. Reagan would sell the program but he expected others--principally Stockman--to formulate it...Stockman quickly found out (but did not show) that he could not "square the circle" after all, which is what "Reaganomics" had promised to do...He had to show that the government would ease up...The projections were, thus, everything. But they were bleak. He had to change them...He was running out of devices and none gave enough yield; so, as he told Laurence Barrett, "We had doctored that one, just the way the previous administration doctored the Wharton model. They're absolutely doctored." But never before doctored on such a scale...
The numbers did not have to be authentic, in the Stockman view. If only people believed them, they would come true as a consequence. Thus faith had to be engendered by whatever legerdemain...As Stockman [said], "We got away with that because of the novelty of all these budget reductions."...But soon he was drowning in his own flood of figures, each uncheckable against the other, all aimed at fostering confidence rather than meeting tests of probability. The con man finally loses his own confidence when he cannot remember what is true and what is not in his own spiel: "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."...At last he had to resort to what Senator Howard Baker called the "magic asterisk," a footnote attributing improbable future reductions in the out years to unidentified "future savings." The Reagan team was beginning to admit what its own Vice President had charged in the primary campaign, that supply-side theory is "voodoo economics."
What Stockman had come to fear most was his own program's success...But Reagan would not change his mind on the part of his program that he loved most by now...Reagan's own certitude and charm had made him, scarily, unbeatable."
Purple Pose
Richard Cohen uses "purple" in the stupidest way at least since the second Stone Temple Pilots album, and in doing so also manages to take pundits' general habit of autohagiography to an even more obscene level.
I live in a state of my own. It is not blue, which is to say anti-Bush. And it is not red, long the color of lefties, commies and the like but now somehow the color of reactionaries -- the GOP and zealous partisans of the president. My own state of mind combines some of the blue with some of the red to produce my own political hue. Color me purple.
[snip]
...some of us cherish moderation, recoil from conspiracy theories and would like, if possible, to stick to the facts. We may dislike Bush's policies, but we do not vitriolically hate the man, think he stole the election or blame our own country for the crimes of Sept. 11. We are the proud Purples -- once the royal color, now the tattered banner of common sense.
It's called a "false synthesis", Dick.
See also
here and
here
I Do News, Too
The Iraq Survey Report is coming soon and, like the Bible, it seems to contain whatever one wishes to find in it:
According to people familiar with the 1,500-page report, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, will find that Saddam was importing banned materials, working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of U.N. agreements and maintaining a dual-use industrial sector that could produce weapons.
Duelfer also says Iraq only had small research and development programs for chemical and biological weapons.
As Duelfer puts the finishing touches on his report, he concludes Saddam had intentions of restarting weapons programs at some point, after suspicion and inspections from the international community waned.
After a year and a half in Iraq, however, the United States has found no weapons of mass destruction — its chief argument for going to war and overthrowing the regime.
Of course, because of U.N. sanctions, "banned materials" could mean damn near anything, but that won't stop morons from saying, "a-ha! plutonium!"
***
The Guardian has
posted excerpts from Seymour Hersh's new book:
By the autumn of 2003, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's political and military misjudgments in Iraq was clear. The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Cambone, was to get tough with the Iraqi men and women in detention - to treat them behind prison walls as if they had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. General Miller was summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures.
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step beyond "Gitmoizing", however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly and exposed to sexual humiliation.
"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up - the black special-access programme - and I'm going in hot.
[snip]
Military intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore "sterile", or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. "You couldn't tell them apart," a source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organisations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom and who had the authority to give orders.
By last autumn, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the CIA had had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core programme in Afghanistan - pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets. And now you want to use it for cab drivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets.'" The CIA balked, the former intelligence official said: "The agency checks with their lawyers and pulls out," ending those of its activities in Abu Ghraib that related to the SAP. (In a later conversation, a senior CIA official confirmed this account.)
The CIA's complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret SAP, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valued covert operation. "This was stupidity," a government consultant told me. "You're taking a programme that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against al-Qaida, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an army of 135,000 soldiers."
In mid 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva convention while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights. "They wanted us to challenge the Bush administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me in May 2004. "They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. [ ... ] The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur." The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. The JAG officers told him that, with the war on terror, a 50-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva convention had come to an end.
Well, Rummy thinks big: if you're gonna defecate on the Geneva Conventions, why not go whole hog and
torture children?
As I Toil Away, Sipping Lattes And Deflating This Aeron Chair With My Fat Ass, Free Trade Looks Like A Sensible Proposition
General Glut catches the Free Trade Dogmatists giving their game away:
We see here the same old New Economy re-tooling eco-babble characteristic of new middle class intellectuals. So what if even the "creative" US economy has millions of textile workers, furniture producers, security guards and hotel cleaners. Sebastian Mallaby lives in Dupont Circle and all his friends are writers, software engineers, economists and advertising executives! So what if South Carolina has lost 17% of its blue-collar manufacturing jobs since January 2001 and North Carolina 22% -- the two states most affected by Chinese textile and furniture exports. Sebastian Mallaby saved $10 at Pier 1 this month!
This is an internecine war in the left that will only get bigger because so many of us have been infected with the "Libertarian" virus, the cure of which is in moving the afflicted from their cozy offices into working-class neighbourhoods, supplemented by an intense programme of reading labels at their local megamarket.
On Top Of His Game
TBOGG hasn't had much time to blog -- he says his house is being treated for termites -- but that can't stop him from doing a little Orkin work for the blogosphere. Pests targeted are the usual suspects:
Coulter,
Malkin,
Totten, and The Cornerites and The Perfessor, too.
Thanks, guy. I, too, love the smell of
napalm DDT in the morning, but the thing about vermin is that they always mutate and come back in
larger numbers.
I'll Sue Your Ass, Bitch! -- Starring RETARDO, Esq. The Frivolous Litigator as Himself
Also Starring:
Sorrell Booke as
"Pete M. Window, Esq."
Paul Lynde as
"Dr Sebly F No"
Gavin McCleod as "Perfessor Zod"
Glenn Reynolds as "Yodeling Zeke"
Little Green Footballs as "The Hee Haw Recovering Alcoholic Jugband"
and
Rex Hamilton as "Abraham Lincoln"
Special Guest Starring:
Claire Forlani as "Claire"
*
I'll Sue Your Ass, Bitch! is performed before a live studio audience*
RETARDO: *enters* *audience applauds* *Dr S. No sits quietly knitting a phallic pillow-cover* "Why, good day, Sebly! I see that you've
completed your move to your darkened lair, how are things are the Cheneys'?"
Dr Sebly F. No: "Oh, smashingly, as usual! Dick went outside to bury kittens up to their necks in turf and then ran them over with a lawnmower, so, ever briefly, that "I'm being attacked by a dentist!" look vanished from his face. Then we had casual sex -- Dick's, perhaps counterintuitively, a bottom -- then I treated myself to a large bowl of oatmeal, which is cachet now, as you well know. I mean organic Peruvian oatmeal, of course, tread and pressed by the feet of natives, not that processed shit one buys at Trader Joe's."
RETARDO: "Right."
Dr Sebly F. No: "Would you be a dear and adjust that portrait of Justin Darr on the mantle?"
RETARDO: "Yes, of course. But really, you don't have to keep up the charade with me, dear Sebly, after all, I know
the truth that Justin Darr is actually one of your alter-egos."
Dr Sebly F. No: *blushing* *mock indignance* "Now you know he's Vlad Putin's bastard son! Norbizness said so!" *audience laughs*
Claire: "RETARDO, I love you!"
RETARDO: "They all do, baby, they all do." *audience cheers and whistles* *RETARDO brightens, and becomes as hubristic as a war-blogger, until he looks down and notices his fly undone* "Uh-oh, Spaghetti-o!" *also like a war-blogger, he does ..nothing about it*
Dr Sebly F. No: *suddenly serious* "You speak of the truth! Hah, what do you know of the truth? You want the truth? You want the Truth? You can't HANDLE the truth! 'Cause when you put your hand into a pile of goo, it was your best friend's face, and you dunno what to do.
Forget it, RETARDO, it's CHINATOWN!" *emphatic* *poses like Celine Dion hitting a high note on the
Titanic soundtrack* *clinches fist*
RETARDO: "Riiight. Um, so, like I was saying...well, I got a letter yesterday that I think is rather interesting. Here, please read it." *He hands the letter to Dr No.*
*Cut to = Pete M. Window's study. Medium Shot. Pete Window is writing this same letter and we hear as a voice-over his dictation as he writes.*
Hey, Retardo...
It's Pete M. Window here. You should be hearing from my attorneys
shortly for the unauthorized appropriation of my blogroll links. I
believe it's a felony. If it isn't, it should be.
In retaliation, I'm just going to have to steal your entire blog.
I'll imprison you in my blogroll (so you won't be able to make
mischief back at your own blog) as soon as I update my template next.
That time of month's coming up soon, though, so it may be a while.
- Pete
*concludes with Mr Window cholerically guffawing = wipe & fade*
*COMMERCIAL BREAK/ =
I'll Sue Your Ass, Bitch! is brought to you in part by a grant from CHUBB*
*Voiceover in the kindly tone of Paul Harvey/ Camera pans over lush tranquil scenery*
"We here at al-CHUBB insurance group declare jihad on the great satans of trial lawyers, hurricanes, and, for good measure, the Canuckistani National Health Care Service. May tort reform be but one weapon the righteous use against you, the unclean infidels! Have a wonderful day."
*Fade in*
Dr Sebly F. No: "Wow, that's some letter, RETARDO, but I'm afraid there's nothing we here at The Firm can do about it. I mean, sure, we hate freedom as much as you do -- we're all comrades, are we not? -- but if you're thinking about a counter-suit, then you're just taking the Ambulance Chasing Ethic too far!"
RETARDO: "What kinda law firm is this?!? This letter calls for legal action just as surely as the sound of an ambulance siren coming down the street! I quit!"
Dr Sebly F. No: *gnomicly* "Ask not for whom the siren wails; the siren wails for thee."
RETARDO: *puzzled and slightly annoyed* "What the fuck does that mean? Blah, I'm not afraid."*He and Claire walk out in a huff*
Dr Sebly F. No: "You will be.
You will be.
*Cut to = Bedroom scene, tastefully done/ RETARDO and Claire, glazed of eye, smiley of face, and short of breath, they both reach for cigarettes*
RETARDO: "You know, I'm gonna sue that fucker, Mr. Window."
Claire: *not very interested* "Why is his nickname 'Dark', anyway?"
RETARDO: "I never found out but always assumed it was something vulgar. You know, plexiglass in a peepshow or something."
Claire: "Oh, yeah. Or maybe he's one of those guys who lays under glass tables and watches people poop."
*Cut to = RETARDO in his home office, typing away, talking to himself, cheering but occasionally cursing, writing writing writing.* *Graphic says "The Next Morning"*
RETARDO: "Yeah, damn you all! I'll show you who hates freedom most of all! Me! I'll win a spot as John Edwards's advisor yet!" *he completes his task and begins to read the letter aloud*
Dear Mr Window:
I have recieved your letter; please consider this as my non-negotiable reply.
Persuant to your threat of litigation, please be appraised of my pending countersuit, which I intend to file today in Federal Court in San Francisco, in which I charge that Mr Pete M. Window, Esquire, is guilty of infringing on the following trademarks wholly or partly owned by elementropy enterprises, LLC, and RETARDO Montalban, Esquire:
The use of pseudolegal threats to coerce various internet site owners into producing links to a specific site, usually that of the threatener.
The wanton use, or threat of use, of photoshopped genuine, filthy and often X-rated pictures of site owners and "bloggers", effectively amounting to common blackmail.
The wholesale of use and disemination of http protocol, so-called "hyperlinks", which elementropy has held copyright of since 1987.
The rampant use of collected groups of letters, called "words", which denote concepts and arrange ideas into what is called "language". Mr Montalban and elementropy enterprises, LLC, has held the copyright on this practice, at least when performed on "weblogs", since 1934, and has punctually renewed this copyright ever since.
When considering the above infringements in addition to the theft of $19.95 worth of services from elementropy enterprises, we call on the Court to place a cease and desist order on "darkwindow.blogspot.com" and to require punative and compensatory damages of not less than $239 trillion dollars.
"Man, that is really good. Now off to the post office and court house."
*Cut to= Pete M. Window reading his mail*
Pete Window: *Clutching his chest while he reads* "Oh my God. I'm so screwed! So Screwed! I'm gonna lose! *Close-up of mail: It's a letter from "Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes"* *He paces frantically in his highrise penthouse* *He then opens the certified letter from RETARDO*
"Nooooooooooooooooo" *He hangs against his desk, swaying and pained; this is a lift from the "I am your father scene" in
The Empire Strikes Back, which the director insists is only an "homage", but he's a pilfering sack of poop*
*Pete M. Window panics, runs to and fro, is obviously having chest pains* *He runs and jumps through his window and falls 87 stories crashing into and through an
AMC Pacer filled with Nazis and rednecks.*
*Cut to= RETARDO and Claire and Dr Sebly F. No roasting marshmallows over the flaming wreckage*
Dr Sebly F. No : "Wow, RETARDO, I really misunderestimatated you -- you really do hate freedom more than anyone else! You are He Who Is Shrill Behind The Rows. You are the Quizach Haddarach of Ambulance Chasers, the Chosen One!"
RETARDO: *shrugs* "Yeah but what are ya gonna do." *Kicks a smouldering laptop away from the wreckage* "Eh, I'm just being a good American."
Dr Sebly F. No: "Well, I'm glad you got rid of Mr. Window. He was really invading my turf!
And he stole Amber from me."
RETARDO and Claire in unison: "As if you play on
that team!" *laughing*
Dr Sebly F. No: "But I'm a flaming heterosexual! I'm as straight as Christmas!" *He looks into the camera, which perfectly frames his heavily rouged face and scarfed neck, and winks*
*Audience laughs*
*And fade*
*Disclaimer: No bloggers were hurt in the filming of this programme.*
And Here I Thought You Were, Like, Making A Totally Different Kind Of Silly Reference
Mr Pete M. Window, who has rudely co-opted the
elementropy blogging programme without sending me my $19.95, is
trying to pick fights with some heavy hitters of the blogosphere, so that he may build traffic and win glory a la' Yours Truly.
Now, after calling my lawyer and notifying the collection agency (and wondering to myself if Mr Window has incriminating photgraphs of all the bloggers he linked to, which in turn led me to wonder if he might share them with me), I went ahead and read some of his linked bloggers -- at least those whom I'd not read before. I was taken by
Corrente, which sounds like a crappy late-70s model sedan, but is actually, as Mr Window helpfully describes, a sort of a "reality blog". His description is apposite. But if Corrente is the
Real World then Leah sorely needs a
Puck-like character to become infatuated with. Oh, did I hear someone nominate Retardo? What a great idea!
Anyway, Corrente does the blogosphere a great service by listing a "Lexicon of Liberal Invective", including such staples as "freeper", "wing-nut", and the eminently embraceable "shrill". But there was one that was new to me,
"wecovery". My mind raced. I didn't want to click on it, I wanted to figure out its provenance on my own. Suddenly, memory ...yes, it flashed: the word had to have been a neologism coined by the late Senator
Paul "I may not be perwfect but at weast I'm honest, Biw Cwinton"
Tsongas. But I was wrong! Corrente defines "wecovery" as the state of the economy when evidence for an upswing is given as "lots of numbers but no jobs."
So my guess was way way off. I'm stupid that way --
stupid like a fox.
Bwahahahahaha
Yeah, I've blogged about it
before, but it's still funny.
Freaks:
Dallas may have hosted the first conservative film festival, but the intellectual roots of the movement lie in, of all places, Little Rock, Ark. A few years back, two local law students, James and Ellen Hubbard, made a trek to the art house only to discover that Hollywood had left them behind. "We looked up and saw there were two choices," Ellen Hubbard said. "Frida, which is about a communist artist"—her voice dropped an octave on the word "communist"—"and Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's previous film. And we thought, Where are the films for mainstream America?" Hubbard, who is middle-aged, has golden hair that was coiffed in the preferred style of a Dallas socialite—raised high, then dramatically swept back over the head. "What better way to counteract the Michael Moores of America," she said, "than to throw a film festival?"
[snip]
Whereas most directors saw conservative filmmaking as a part of the larger Republican jihad, Balsiger saw it as a way to make a fortune. He said his multimillion-dollar company, Grizzly Adams Productions, submits hundreds of ideas to the Gallup Organization for polling each year and then makes a film about whichever idea comes back with the highest score. "We knew dinosaurs were dead as a topic before anybody else did," Balsiger explained. Bush's religiosity tested well as a theme, so Balsiger gave Faith in the Whitehouse the green light, alongside titles like The Evidence for Heaven.
Balsiger wasn't a true believer, but after all the carping about liberal studio chieftains, his ruthless capitalism seemed refreshingly, well, conservative. "I think conservatives are always whining that everybody's against them, and that's not true," he said. He motioned toward a table with stacks of unsold DVDs. "Most of the product over there is at the wrong price point, $20. That's too high. I sold mine out in three hours, and I'm at $14.95." The conservatives may one day seize Hollywood, but first they'll have to figure out how to price their DVDs.
It's of course right for Balsiger to note wingnuts' bizarre self-pity, but he really draws blood by showing what incompetent businesspeople they are.
Update: It gets better, and
so very witty.
"I've Been Around The World And I-I, I Can't Find No Bushies"
No, this post is not about
Ben Shapiro's sexual frustrations.
It's about an anxious world.
This November, when you cast your vote against
Alfred E. President, take some satisfaction that you aren't just, as it were, speaking for yourself, but you're also speaking for the millions who can only watch our election with dread, people who are (negatively, almost always) affected by our leadership and its policies, yet have no say.
And
they are legion:
"It is absolutely clear that John Kerry would win handily if the people of the world could vote," said Steve Kull, director of The Program on International Policy Attitudes of the University of Maryland, a co-sponsor of the survey. "It is rather striking that just one in five people surveyed around the world support the re-election of President Bush."
.
The poll of 34,330 people older than 15 from all regions of the world found that the majority or plurality of people from 32 countries prefer Kerry to Bush.
.
Asia was the region showing the most mixed results, although Kerry still did better than Bush. Kerry won clear majorities in China, Indonesia and Japan, but slipped past Bush by only a slight margin in Thailand and India.
.
The most negative attitude toward the U.S. came from France, Germany and Mexico, where roughly 80 percent of those surveyed thought that the foreign policies of President Bush had made them feel worse about the United States.
.
In addition to presidential preferences, the poll also inquired about people's views on U.S. foreign policy.
.
"We found an unusually low level of support for U.S. foreign policy," Kull said. "This runs in line with trends from recent attitude surveys by the Pew Research Center and may have implications when the U.S. wants to move forward on issues with its closest allies."
.
The polling in a total of 35 countries was conducted by The Program on International Policy Attitudes and the polling company GlobeScan Incorporated during a period ranging from several days to several weeks, starting in mid-May and running through early September.
.
Most traditional U.S. allies came out strongly favoring Kerry, while only those polled in Nigeria, Poland and the Philippines preferred Bush.
.
"Even where the president does beat John Kerry, there is no enthusiasm apparent from the numbers," Kull said. "Those countries that support him for re-election also tend not to like his foreign policy."
.
The only country where Bush received support from more than half of those polled was the Philippines, where 57 percent supported his election, compared with 32 percent who supported Kerry. About one third of those polled in Nigeria and Poland gave their support to Bush, while support for Kerry ran at a margin of about five percentage points lower.
.
Norway and Germany tied - at 74 percent - as the countries where those polled most strongly support Kerry. Canadians preferred Kerry by a ratio of 61 percent to 16 percent for Bush.
I think Nigeria's love of Bush/Cheney is
self-explanatory. Poland's is going downhill steadily; they don't appreciate the slap Bush gave them over visa limitations, especially after risking so much by joining in on Iraq (Bush did not deliver the quo to that quid). As for the Phillipines, I'll just concede, though it's possible that the pollsters' calls were accidentally routed to Michelle Malkin's cell.
Anyway, there you have it. The world fears, loathes, and disrespects Bush. Plainly the world isn't as scary and insane as I'd thought, but then I guess I've always known that most of the scary and insane people are my neighbours. Speak for those without a voice; be an internationalist human instead of a
nationalsocialist nationalist pig.
Vote for
Retardo Montalban Lyndon LaRouche Ralph Nader David Cobb Charles Jay & Marilyn Chambers John Kerry and John Edwards in November.
In Case You're Wondering: They're Curled Up On The Couch, Eating Chocolates And Watching Lifetime's Movie Of The Week
I believe I have discovered the reason why my
mortal enemies dear friends
Dr Sebly F. No and
Pete M. Window periodically disappear from their blogs -- the result of which being a chaotic overflow in their comments sections like sinks filled with so many dirty dishes. True, various explanations have been floated: some say they are drunken, others say that
Amber Pawlik's overdriven libido leaves all involved for several days unable to type much less walk, still others mention Seb's legal problems, which stem from a nagging manslaughter charge he recieved after fatally bursting a freeper's spleen by speaking French
in their presence. But this last excuse does not explain Pete M. Window's disappearances, but then it need not if the rumour is true that he is a bot constructed out of cyber-ether by the mischievous entities of
Fafblog. Anyway, in the event that any of the excuses are false, I believe that my alternative explanation, by which I rigorously adhere to the principle of Occam's tampon, is most likely correct:
They're menstruating.
Those monthly mood swings, long considered an exclusively female affliction, may not be as gender-specific as once thought.
Researchers say men can get pre-menstrual tension too and now they have data to back it up.
A study by psychologists from the University of Derby in England suggests that men may experience cyclical symptoms similar to, or even worse than, those suffered by pre-menstrual women, including moodiness, discomfort and loss of concentration. Everything, it appears, apart from the bloat.
Trust me, good doctors: they have the bloat, too -- though in Seb's case I can testify that it's more because of intestinal gas than water-retention.
So, uh.. yeah. Now what was I saying? Oh, I need to mention that my absence was due to computer difficulties and nothing else.
(Thanks to Poly for the link. :))
The Shorter Christopher Hitchens
Link:
It pisses me off when people, aside George W. Bush, use casualties or deathtolls to advance their own agendas.
Disclaimer: Shorter concept inspired by
busy, busy, busy from an idea by
D-Squared; disclaimer concept gleefully stolen from
Sadly, No!
"Forgeries!"
I would comment on the recent desperation tactic, but there's little that I can add to
this.
Update: What TBOGG dishes out in style, amygdala dishes in
substance.
Meanwhile, more hubris: a fool at
The Corner thinks that a DOJ inquiry should be started, to investigate the CBS "fraud".
Update Update: everything to counter the freeper "Bizarro Niger" forgery claim can be found at
Daily KOS.
None of this crap matters anyway. Bush disobeyed an order, that much is proven and that's the fire that needs to be held at their feet. This freeper/littlegreenfascist shit is just a diversion.
Forensics Apply Even Outside Our Space-Time Continuum
The entities of
Fafblog (Fafnir, Giblets and The Medium Lobster), whose collective silly genius I have before
praised and who, perhaps more importantly, exist outside the four known dimensions, may indeed be "in temporal flux" but regardless are, I believe, the authors of still another classic internet site.
Now before I go on I must caution: this is only educated conjecture; I can confirm nothing. Also, I am taking a terrible risk in advancing my hypothesis for, as everyone knows, the entities of Fafblog are wrathful and vindictive, and I know that if they wish they could poof me out of this dimension, shooting me through hyperspace to gasp with a fishy breathless mouth my last minutes on some airless moon of Altair-4. Yes, they are that powerful: like
Mxyztplk,
Q, and the
rakshasa all rolled into one, with some extra-cryptic fortune cookies and dashes of
Baudrillard and
Calvino thrown in for good measure. These are powerful and multiplicitous beings indeed: if they made a live album, it would be called Entities in Ten Cities!
Even so, they are not immune to the detective skills of RETARDOlmes! Now, dear
Watson reader, as I light my pipe and administer the seven percent solution, I shall relate to you, occasionally punctuating relevant passages by firing bullets into my wall in the design of "ER" in honour of her majesty, the tale of a once famous internet personality whose identity -- or I should say, identities -- and whereabouts have always been a mystery, until now.
My first -- well, only -- clue was discovered when I came across this
post at Fafblog. It is "rosebud", I tell you! I felt an exhilaration in reading it as Oedipus must have felt as he vanquished the sphinx! All the answers were in this one post: the idiosyncratic spelling and grammar of Fafblog was, I always thought, peculiar, but I couldn't quite place where I'd seen it before. But in this post, it was the Fafbloggers' word choice that led to my Archimedal "Eureka!" moment and when I knew that I was destined for eternal fame like that one guy
who deduced who'd written Primary Colors.
Now the setting for this post is that Fafnir and Giblets are undertaking a "socratic-style dialogue" through which they'll arrive at "Deeper Truths". Hmmm. I once knew a somewhat Hegelian net personality who was monomaniacal on the dialectic of "skinny vs. fat". His "dialogue", too, was just as exclusively one-sided as Fafnir's. Pow!
FAFNIR: Why hello Giblets! I see you are almost fully immersed in a bowl of ham jello.
GIBLETS: Unnngh... Giblets is in such pain.
Two things, the first being: References to "ham" and "jello" or even "ham jello" abound in this post. Not quite obsessive (Fafnir is no Humbert Humbert gaga over nymphette pork products, or at least I don't
think so); more like compulsive. A hiccup to establish setting and context, but a peculiarly insistent hiccup nonetheless. The second: Giblets's intoductory dialogue is onomatopoetic ("Unnngh") which will be repeated throughout. Well, I once knew of an internet personality whose catchphrases involved similar vocabulary ("porkbeast!", "porkfat", "made of pork") and whose "interlocutor" was similarly incoherent ("blaaarg!", "urpagooooooodfaaalkaajaaa!!!!!!!") From now on, in the quoted text I will emphasise these references. Bang!
FAF.: Oh no Giblets! You have not been eatin pork to painful excess again have you?
GIBS.: Giblets does it... GLLGGLL... for national greatness. He stuffs himself with liquid ham... for the glory of the republic!
[snip]
FAF.: Well lets say he's a big fat man stuck in a mine shaft an there are like a dozen other people trapped in there because the fat man he is just so fat.
GIBS.: This is an improbably fat man we are talkin about.
FAF.: Maybe he has been eatin ham jello. For the glory of the republic.
GIBS.: Then he can stuff off. This is Giblets's ham jello.
FAF.: Anyway the question is should we blow up the fat man if there is no other way to get him out of the mine shaft to free the trapped an starving people inside when we know that blowin up the fat man is cruel murder?
GIBS.: Ha! I'd like to see you try! The explosives'll just make the mine shaft collapse an squish everyone inside.
FAF.: Giiiiblets, you're ruinin my moral dileeeema.
GIBS.: The real solution is to keep the starvin people inside the shaft alive by eatin the fat man. Problem solved.
FAF.: But Giblets what if in killin the fat man you are motivated not by the duty of savin the trapped people but by petty hatred of the fat man?
Notice the "moral dileeeema" involves the question of whether or not to eat a fat person. Also notice the gratuitous fat references. This is very familiar though inverted. I once knew of someone who constantly dramatised the dilema of a fat person eating many normal-sized ones, to immorally satisfy their "beanbag cravings", and often ended a scene (as Fafnir goes on to do in a passage I do not quote) in a cliffhanger fashion: (to paraphrase)"Oh no! please don't eat me porkfat, I can't esc--".
Also, notice in the text the clipped "g"s from the progressive verbs and "d"s from "and". Hmmm. I remember someone who played with tenses and often truncated letters that were rendered silent or near-silent by some accents. Close enough.
Caseclosed. Bang!
Yes, the Fafbloggers, wherever and whatever (animal, vegetable, mineral, unclassifiable) they "are", also were (are? "are"?? Argh, time has no meaning to them, Retardo!) one and the same as
Miguel of FCIPH, the famed exorcist of fatasms, and sworn enemy of
"Deirdra Babe". Now it is out, and I tremble at the possible repercussions. But perhaps in recognising me as someone who has had his own battles with various "Deirdra Babes" in his time on the internet, from
Neosporin to the very new but promising
Krempasky, the Fafbloggers/Miguel may be inspired to entreat me with comradery. But then who can be certain, for they are a fickle lot.
So here is my fear: that if one gets the Fafbloggers to say "Miguel" backwards, they will poof out of our dimension and back into the Bizarro world from whence they came. Now we do not want this because they provide great entertainment for us even though they are dangerously powerful and smirk at most known laws of physics (I'm told that Medium Lobster once mindmelded with Stephen Hawking -- the unrelated outtakes were recorded by Fafnir and may be found
here -- only to tease the poor physicist into dreaming a pointless theory he has since
disowned). Shit! My computer screen flickered, and I swear I saw for an instant
this image which said to me balefully "Fafnir is comin to kill you an stuff, porkfatty!".
I admit that I am afraid. Since I have now "outted" them, there is the possiblity of retribution like the aforementioned deportation to Altair-4. But they can do more than that. They could turn me into a penguin, or simply burst through my wall and kill me whether I yelled "Kool-Aid" beforehand or not. Or make me a Kleenex box in
Ben Shapiro's bathroom pantry (Please, Fafblog, for the love of God kill me first!)
Please don't tell them I wrote this. But also please don't let anyone trick them into saying any of their names backwards -- or, ultimate no-no, trick them into saying all their names backwards
at once, which would result in total particle reversal in the whole universe, making US the anti-matter in an anti-verse but reversing the process for Fafblog, kinda like at the end of that A-ha video, except with like, mushroom clouds and shit.
Bang!
*As Retardo's last bullet majestically completes the "ER" in his wall, the wall collapses, exposing an anthropomorphic pitcher with the grimacing amalgamated features of Miguel/Fafnir/Giblets/The Medium Lobster (The Quadity!), stomping forth saying "yeah, yeah, yeah" while Retardo cowers....*
**Edit -- Cleaned things up a bit.
"Sorry, Mr Krempasky, But I Don't Go In For These Backdoor Shenanigans"*
Mike Krempasky, an RNC-credentialed blogger of
redstate.org, has seen fit to address my
criticisms by
replying in a highly suggestive -- even adhesive -- manner very much along the lines of "mine is bigger than yours, but might I see yours just to make sure?":
Ah, dear friend. Call it whining, if you will... But frankly, I think that blogs can have a much greater impact, even yours - with your towering average of 31 hits a day. Remarkable pair of nads, you've got[!] - to shell so much criticism from such a tiny...pulpit.[!]
What can I say?
I'm sorry, Mr Krempasky,
"Sure, I'm flattered, maybe even a little curious, but the answer is no!"
And with all this rather uncomfortably in mind, I nonetheless cheerfully suggest that in light of his Freudian revelations it would be seemly for Mr Krempasky to do a little soul searching before he takes Sully to task for
his attack on Rick Santorum, whom Krempasky seems rather eager to defend.
And now for the substance of Krempasky's love letter, such of it there is:
Anyways, to the matter at hand [!]. Embargos are good things - and they are to be respected. Liberal, conservative, doesn't matter. I wouldn't break one on Bush or Kerry - we all face the same struggle - being taken seriously by those in power. (ok, so your struggle is a little more significant)[!] By showing no aptitude for discretion, it makes us all look bad.
To paraphrase
Kos, I spit on Krempasky's
affected rectitude, which was newly discovered and quickly forgotten: the hallmark of a phony. What Kos did was far less a dirty trick than what Tacitus did with regard to the protestors, which he has since elaborated on, and Krempasky has never seen fit to condemn as a modicum of consistency should require. As such, Krempasky can Cheney himself -- and I say this in regard to his lack of principle as well as in regard to his vulgar staring, as it were, at my package, both of which were conveyed by a posted comment intended to be wounding to me but in actuality unintentionally hilarious in its semiliteracy as well as in its leitmotiv of sticky, unilateral desire.
**Edit --clarified part of the sentence linking to Krempasky's defence of Santorum, of which I especially like Krempasky's unironic use of the phrase "Santorum with the most juice in the state" -- unironic, you know, considering
this.
"I Can Be Nearly Crazy Enough For Your Tastes If You'd Only Let Me Speak"
William F. Buckley in Horowitz's FPM:
FP: What did you think of the Democratic National Convention? Carter struck me as especially pathetic. This is a President who lost two crucial allies of America’s, Iran and Nicaragua, to our enemies and who stood by when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. In many respects, the rise of militant Islam was spawned under – and because of – his incompetent presidency. And yet he is still lecturing – moralistically at that -- the Republicans on how to conduct foreign policy. What did you make of this in particular and of the DNC in general?
Buckley: Dear Jamie, you are answering my questions for me. Thanks...
***
Also,
The Shorter William F. Buckley:
Silly Democrats, practicing your speeches! Also, one day people will not love Bill Clinton. So There.
And:
I concede Kerry made a good speech but Dick Cheney is a great debator so Kerry/Edwards better watch out.
Disclaimer: Shorter concept inspired by
busy, busy, busy from an idea by
D-Squared.
**Update & Disclaimer: Disclaimer blithely stolen from
Sadly, No! and woulda gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddlin' Sebs!
Snap! Don't Make Me Crack You Like a Peanut Shell, Biatch!
Venerable statesman, retired peanut farmer, and former President James Earl Carter
gets all up in Zell Miller's face, know whut I'm sayin?
You seem to have forgotten that loyal Democrats elected you as mayor and as state senator. Loyal Democrats, including members of my family and me, elected you as lieutenant governor and as governor. It was a loyal Democrat, Lester Maddox, who assigned you to high positions in the state government when you were out of office. It was a loyal Democrat, Roy Barnes, who appointed you as U.S. Senator when you were out of office. By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.
Yes, Zell Miller betrayed his party; he's a Benedict Arnold, a Quisling. But Carter isn't one for Republicanesque/O'Reillyesque demands of
zero dissent, which is why Carter and many Democrats are decent if often wrong where the other side is concentrated evil. But I digress.
Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.
Zing! That Strom Thurmond reference has gotta sting, even though the much-dread Sully is probably right (for once) in thinking that it wouldn't sting
Miller personally. But the point is that one can disagree without publicly and extravagantly urinating on the base and mechanics that put one in high office. Contrast Zell to, say, Ben Nighthorse Campbell.
Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends.
For now it has, at least. But even if that trend doesn't continue (and I doubt it will), what matters is Miller's intent, and Carter knows it.
Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you described previously as “one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders -- and a good friend.")
I love that "should have given you pause". Jimmy Carter, still using the mild jargon of diplomacy (he did triumph at Camp David, after all) when it's evident that he is blisteringly angry.
I, myself, never claimed to have been a war hero, but I served in the navy from 1942 to 1953, and, as president, greatly strengthened our military forces and protected our nation and its interests in every way. I don’t believe this warrants your referring to me as a pacificist.
Well, of course it doesn't but then Miller has bought the whole Republican ball of lies. I'll have more to say pertaining to this passage later. For now, notice Carter's modesty.
Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.
Which means, "You're not worthy, biatch." How true.
All this is due attention because Carter, famously mild, has become wrath here and I love it.
Jimmy Carter was not a good president, even though his successors have done their collective best to make him look good in comparison. Carter's faults lay in poor execution and bad luck, but not in lack of integrity and ideals. This last is what makes the right especially despise him.
The right's myth of Ronald Reagan holds that he was a peace-loving, gentle, decent Christian man who was above dirty tricks and had a courageous common sense that trumped supposedly vascilating pointy-headed liberal "intellectualism." No surprise that all except that last are in truth applicible to Carter but can only be falsely applied to Ronald Reagan, whose campaign stole Jimmy Carter's debate notebook and engineered the October Surprise release of hostages from Iran (which, when added to Iran-Contra hostage bargaining and the sacking of Alexander Haig and subsequent withdrawl of US forces from Lebannon, nicely explodes the myth that Reagan was some sort of stalwart -- on the other hand, Carter at least attempted a militarised hostage rescue, which was of course an embarrassing failure of execution).
Carter advocated the decriminalisation of marijuana, while Reagan infamously wanted people to "just say no" and if they didn't, had the book thrown at them. Which is Christian as in tolerant and which is Puritan as in mean-spirited? Also, which makes the most "common sense" policy-wise? Carter, unlike Reagan, practiced what
Reagan preached with regard to family values. Thus, divorcee Reagan was a hypocrite who didn't recognise his own children, while Carter was actually "Christian" about it and what's more had the decency to refrain from pushing it on others. Reagan famously slept most of the day, was so inattentive otherwise that he could get away with lying about Iran-Contra by saying that he wasn't informed and had little recollection. He had little knowledge of geopolitics and history (Armenian genocide?) and had a penchant for slander (President Gerald Ford "is a communist!") that would do Richard Nixon justice. On the other hand, Carter was considered a workaholic by nearly everyone, as far as I know never slandered (or "misspoke" in a conveniently slanderous way) his poltical opponents, and at least had the IQ to become a nuclear engineer, something which Zell Miller's President-of-choice can't even
pronounce much less wrap his head round the concept of. Such facts make for wrathful Conservatives.
Again, Carter wasn't an effective President. He listened, disasterously, to Zbigniew Brzezinki more than he did to Cyrus Vance, and the results, in funding the mujahadin in Afghanistan, may or may not have been acceptable for the time but doubtless laid the groundwork, which Reagan continued and expanded, to 9/11. (Maybe he should have
listened more to Robert Redford? No, just kidding.) Anyway, this is the first case where an acting president listened too much to the advice of a neocon, and we know how well all the subsequent cases have turned out. Carter's wheat embargo on the Soviet Union was a disaster for American farmers, and his boycott of the Moscow 1980 Olympics, while understandable as a symbol at the time, pretty much destroyed the popularity of the event when the Soviets reciprocated in '84; still, he employed symbol and force in the Cold War, and so cannot be considered "pacifistic."
..except when compared to the
litany of liars that menaced him so, and who are very much like the dishonest fuck-ups whom Zell Miller has now embraced. But that doesn't make Miller's accusation true, it just makes it a ridiculous exercise in semantics. Thus, being careful is being "pacifistic" while being
reckless and dishonest is the preferable course in Zell's eyes. Jimmy Carter is more than right to send this letter to Miller which renders Ol' Zell into so much crunchy Skippy peanut butter (I'll resist the urge to write "Peanut Butter and Zelly").
**Update: Not to pat myself on the back, but I thought I was right to avoid crapulent license with Zell's name: it's been done to death. But that doesn't stop
Jonah Goldberg, whose wordplays on Zell's name get ever more eye-rolling.
**Update Again : I am a sloppy writer and excreable proofreader. I changed a completely inappropriate word. Also clarified a different sentence.
How To Get Ahead In Blogging, or "Dr Sebly F. No, I Presume?"
Greetings, readers of
Sadly, No! and
Dark Window.
You've come here, read my
drivel witty posts and informative commentary and you must, of course, wonder: how has this happened?
After all, yesterday elementropy was just another blog among billions, utterly indistinguishable from the masses. Now, elementropy has "arrived", and is getting beaucoups of traffic.
I'm here to tell you why. Because the only way to get ahead is by blackmail. It may or may not be true that I have in my possession risque photos of Dr. Sebly F. No and Youppi as well as of Pete M and Aynber Pawlik
which are all filthy, I tell you: watersports, bukkake, it's all there. But the point is that the threat of exposing these allegedly lurid pictures is enough to coerce links from my
targets new friends, bringing me traffic and joy.
And for $19.95, I'll show you how you, too, can
fiendishly leach off better bloggers through blackmail and pyramid schemes get all the traffic *your* site deserves.
Please send $19.95 and SASE to retardomontalban -at- yourmom.com for your starter kit today.
Polls, Schmolls
Don't worry, freedom-haters!
Kerry's
been there and won that.
BOSTON — John F. Kerry has been here before.
Turning into the final eight weeks of the presidential campaign, the Democratic nominee faces doubts within his party and pundits increasingly skeptical of his chances against a resurgent President Bush (news - web sites), who seems to have momentum heading his way.
It is reminiscent of the Democratic race last winter, when Kerry was counted among the living dead and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news - web sites) was romping to the Democratic nomination — or so it appeared.
But there is another contest that may be instructive, a campaign that political connoisseurs rate as one of the all-time classics: the 1996 U.S. Senate race between Kerry and Massachusetts' popular Republican governor, William F. Weld.
"A championship match between two world-class politicians," said John Martilla, a longtime Kerry friend and campaign advisor. Counterparts in the Weld camp agree.
Although no election is like any other, the close-quarters combat of that Senate race offers clues to how the Democratic nominee operates under pressure, the steps he will take to win — and suggests why Democrats, nervous as some may be, are counting on another Kerry comeback.
No problem. We've only just
begun our counterpunch.
Kerry surrogates were also out in full force Friday, taking issue with many of the specific attacks leveled at the Democratic nominee during the GOP convention. In a morning conference call with reporters, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) vowed that "the rebuttal of what they've thrown at us has just begun."
Former senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) took the defense a step further by comparing the Republicans' misleading statements to those of Nazi Germany. "You've just got to separate out fact from fiction. . . . Too often, too often, in this country, if you hear something repeated, it's the old Hitler business -- if you hear something repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, you start to believe it," he said.
EEEEEk! How shrill! John Glenn, you hate freedom. Predictible whining on the Glenn quote may be found
here by John Derbyshire and
here by Ramesh Ponnuru.
Boo fucking hoo.
There are lies and smears, and there are
lies and smears. The latter, which is rightly termed Nazified, is more clearly defined by this description of Robert Moses (a mid-century NYC Lord of Corruption) by Gore Vidal:
Suddenly, [Moses's] friend the governor [Herbert Lehman] was 'a miserable, snivelling man..contemptible.' Moses also charged that Lehman 'created most of the state deficit.' Actually, Lehman had reduced the deficit to almost zero. But then Moses always had a Hitlerian capacity for the lie so big that it knocks the truth out of the victim who knows that his denial will never be played as big in the press as the lie itself.*
This perfectly describes Republican election strategy since at least the time of Richard Nixon. It was especially the hallmark of
Lee Atwater.
The good news is, aside media bias and Kerry's hesitance, a huge lie can sometimes bite its spreaders (and their supporters) in the ass. Robert Moses was eventually defeated; there's already a backlash against Zell Miller; swiftboatvet-pushing Bush will follow. Bush's fatal mistake is that he has so many genuine skeletons in his closet, where Kerry has but counterfeit ones. Huge lies have an effect, but they can be countered in time.
And when they are, tellers and re-tellers of Hitlerian lies will go over the cliff, too.
Lie that often, and that, well, largely, and you deserve being called Nazis.
Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis.
In my reveries I imagine Ponnuru and Derbyshire peering over the backseat in a fucking
Ford Pinto station wagon, whispering in the
driver George W. Bush's ear,
"Sir, I have always loved you."
* - Quote from "What Robert Moses Did To New York City",
The New York Review of Books, October 17, 1974
What Young Republicans Do
Kick women crawling on the floor.
They'll try to say that it's morally equivalent to a protestor hitting a cop who is armed and in full riot gear.
Link via
Talk Left.
Someone mentions in the Talk Left comments: what if she were pregnant? Odds are the YR punk who kicked the woman was one of those blathery pro-life types. How perfect.
*Edited for clarity.
Good Stuff
From the geniuses who brought you
Betty Bowers and
The Landover Baptist Church, comes
The Official George W. Bush Re-Selection Site, which is to presidential campaigns what
The Onion is to general news reporting.
The success of parody is largely determined by its detail, by providing a sort of false verisimilitude; properly executed parody is an exaggeration of (or rephrasing -- literally and figuratively -- of)
many of its subject's traits. A parody of a single trait quickly bores and is often neutralised (honestly or not) by the much over-used strawman defence. But a carefully constructed parody which aims for thorough, detailed charicature is often obliterating.
The
Bush Re-Selection Site obliterates. I Love it. Link via
Feministe.
***
World O' Crap offers "'Sex You Up' Saturday", a clearinghouse post on skanky, hermaphroditic, and utterly disgusting political personalities.
Skanky -- The case of
Washingtonienne, whose blog made for a minor if eye-rolling cause celebre when discovered, is given a full treatment if not, thank god, the stiff rogering Washingtonienne herself recieved, often anally, by married
hypocrites Republicans in DC.
World O'Crap informs us that Ms Jessica Cutler (nee' Washingtonienne) is rather vapid, is a
Rockefeller Republican rather than a puritanical Reagan-Bush type, benefitted from what she describes as DC's low general standards of beauty, has recently
posed nekkid for
Playboy, and is newly wealthy from a recent book deal.
Yes, Ms Cutler is attractive in her nude photos. Allowing for the fact that
Playboy's photographers are maestros, Cutler is petite and proportioned with nice, vaguely Eurasian, facial features. That she's not WASPy or Barbie beautiful shouldn't be a problem, should it? I'm not surprised that liberals are unimpressed with Cutler's "celebrated" cuteness, but I am surprised that wingnuts find her so unappealing (maybe it's because she looks "multicultural"?). But then I have yet to see the rightwing's
chronic masturbators opine on the subject.
Conclusion: The saga of Washingtonienne restates several things we already know: that we are ruled by venal hypocrites, that we love sex scandals which do not matter but we ignore financial scandals that most definitely do matter, and that it's sad that the slightly-better-than average looking can score big by fucking the right people and telling the tale rather than by exhibiting the slightest talent or intelligence.
Hermaphroditic -- Of course, this can only apply to Ms Ann Coulter, a.k.a.
The Toxic Toothpick. Adam's apple Ann, apparently adept at tucking back
Mr. Winkie so that she could thrill wingnuts with her purple miniskirt, stoked the collective appetite by graphicly describing abortion procedures at an RNC luncheon.
Conclusion: Hermaphroditic stanks, tarted-up and reeking of testosterone-envy and elaborating on graphic medical procedures, may not be the projectile vomit-inducing MCs that we suppose, provided that the audience is composed of wingnuts who, as everyone knows, are
brain-eating zombies.
Utterly Disgusting -- Rush Limbaugh, a drug addict still married to his third wife and still, possibly, suffering from the ingrown, pus-laden cyst on his ass (which came in handy not only as an excuse for his ass-scratching, but to gain deferments from the Vietnam War), is getting kissy with CNN anchorperson Daryn Kagan.
Conclusion: Vacuous TV personalities will fuck anything. We already knew that. Also, Rush Limbaugh has a "what, me worry?" attitude to his own hypocrisies which get ever bigger. But then we knew that, too.
Wonkette should take notes on Ms S.Z.'s post which is, cumulatively, impressive: this is how it's
done. And though the thoroughness of the post is to be commended (size matters!), I mean it more with regard to style. Prickliness (as it were!) is a far better affectation than apathy. Ms Z. is catty where Ms Cox is often a tad too blase'.
"So I Said To Woody Allen, 'Well, Camus Can Do, But Sartre Is Smart-re.'"
Jumping To Conclusions: "Oh, yeah? Well, Scooby-Doo can
doo doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter."
*
(One shouldn't let the Jimmy Carter mention be borne in mind too literally: the subject of this post, like his blogmate, is ultra-reactionary to the point that anyone actually extolling Carter's virtues in his presence would doubtless be quickly dismissed as an America-hater.)
I wish I had an html tumbleweed that could blow by their banal posts whenever these
yuppie dipshits use their blogs to brag on arguments they supposedly won, or on bon mots they supposedly dished out to delighted comrades or to justly withered enemies:
A friend of mine, with whom I was arguing about the war, not only repeated the canard that we're acting unilaterally, but when challenged on it, dismissed our allies as being "bullied and bribed" and thus inconsequential. Just like John Kerry. Hmmm, must have been reading from the same talking points. And theirs is the side who purports to "repair our standing in the world"?
Oh, yeah. That's so good. There's just no comeback.
Except that Ari Fleischer got laughed off stage for making the same
silly claim, by people who are well familiar with how easily and how often their governments are bribed (and with, it must be added, how in character it was for Bushies to offer bribes).
And "bullied" perfectly describes the majority of people of the countries of the "coalition" who were against the war. In the first country among these that had elections (Spain), the bullied people kicked out the pro-Bush leader. This is democracy, after all, an admittedly unsavoury concept for yuppie reactionaries. Look for it to happen in Poland and Oz, too, and hopefully even in America in November, provided that democracy is actually
allowed to work this time.
* -- Fixed quotation
It Was So Bad That Even They Could See It
The very conservative Evelyn Rothschild's paper, the also very conservative
The Economist, offers a
critique of the RNC finale and Bush speech which demonstrates that even Tories think Bush has gone far too far.
added a new theme: the “ownership society”. Broadly speaking, he wants to cut taxes and put more decision-making (and risk) in individual hands by encouraging saving for retirement, health care and home ownership.
More controversially, Mr Bush also revived his call for a partial privatisation of Social Security, the cornerstone federal pensions programme. Social Security is facing huge deficits once the baby-boom generation retires. The president advocates individual accounts, into which workers would put part of their pay cheques, to be invested in assets of their choosing. Mr Bush sold this as a way to guarantee benefits. But with a stockmarket slump and corporate scandals still fresh in the memory, peddling investment accounts as a guarantee against insecurity may be a tough sell.
Unsurprisingly, the nasty fiscal situation that Mr Bush would face in a second term went unmentioned, though it loomed over his speech like a ghost at the banquet. Big deficits—caused by a combination of an economic downturn and Mr Bush’s tax cuts—are expected to last at least ten years. The cost of switching to Mr Bush’s Social Security plan is estimated at about $1 trillion. He cannot push this plan, extend his tax cuts and follow through with other new domestic programmes announced on Thursday (including more spending on housing and higher education) without plunging the budget further into the red. He described Mr Kerry as a “tax-and-spend” type, but his plans seem to show him as a “cut-taxes-and-spend” type, not obviously a superior breed.
[snip]
The morning after his speech, the Bureau of Labour Statistics brought him some small comfort. Firms added 144,000 workers to the payrolls in August, and the figures for July and June were revised up a little. The unemployment rate fell a notch, to 5.4%, largely because 152,000 people dropped out of the labour force. The summer job market turned out to be far worse than the president had expected in the spring, but better than he may have feared on Thursday night.
[snip]
While he defended his assertiveness, however, Mr Bush offered no new plans in foreign policy. He had nothing to say about reform of the intelligence services. Iran and North Korea did not figure either. Nor, unsurprisingly, did the still-at-large Osama bin Laden. With nearly 140,000 American troops tied down in Iraq, there is simply little room for new threats against America’s enemies. Mr Bush’s speech was more a plea to trust him for what he has done in the past than a signal of what he hopes to do in the future.
[snip]
Election day is two months away, and the Democrats seem to be showing that they can punch as low as the Republicans. Negative campaigning is nothing new in American politics, but the enthusiasm for it at the Republican convention, and the vigour with which the Democrats are responding, will make this election campaign a particularly nasty one.
(All bolded text denotes my emphasis, not The Economist's.)
All this is perfectly fine and sober analysis, if necessarily conventional and unimaginative. But then it is conservative. It is also blessedly spin-free. Even so, there is no questioning the depth of its skepticism to Bush. I think that says a lot.
---
I emphasise the
genuine conservatism of the paper and its proprietor because of the fact that, in America, the political spectrum has become so falsely skewed to the point that
reactionary jackasses, without a sliver of irony, can lay claim to the titles of "centrist" and "moderate", with precious few then objecting to the deception or delusion in the seizure. When the spectrum is this warped the result is that the genuine
ultra-reactionaries and
crypto-fascists then take delight in observing their extremist position legitimised as merely "conservative", while true conservatives like those at
The Economist can be freely denounced as "liberal".
Boo Hoo, Again
Quickly doing their jobs in the face of so much
crap, the AP's fact-checkers, well ...
do exactly that.
But REPORTING that a speech is full of lies is apparently
an opinion and therefore an editorial, say the
whiners at The Corner. (And in doing so they quite give their own game away.)
But even before then the mood was apparent:
Krempasky and the dreadful
Tacitus, credentialed RNC-ers at redstate.org, fans of an adminstration which delights in strategic leaking, stuffily (of course) condemned
Daily Kos "for breaking the embargo".
Spare me. Tacitus, for one, is the last person in the blogosphere who should claim high ethical standards, after his going out in the streets among the protestors, to find the most unphotogenic possible so that he could (as is his habit, without humour and without irony)
label them "the Kerry Base", and to further falsify by saying that
they said they were the Kerry Base.
The elementropy Audio-Visual Club
Like
Ezra said,
this is the "Best. Graphic. Ever."
And who knew that
Choda-Boy was a
Republican?
The Zell-failed Follies:
Violence.
"Now witness the firepower of this FULLY ARMED AND OPERATIONAL battle station."Constipated, with Dick Cheney.
Godzella! (
with more
cowbell?)
Zombie-Zell; and Zell
with kitty.
Catch offers a collage, Norbizness provides captions in the comments, and of course is all over the RNC picture fest on his
own blog. Meanwhile, Rising Hegemon has captioning fun
here and
here.
Then there is the Daily Show's scoop of Bush's
campaign film, which is a must-see.
And that does it for our A-V meeting today. Props to
atrios, from whom I stole many of these links. Zombie link via
Dark Window; kitten picture via
The Poor Man.
*Update: Americablog has posted the whole Daily Show send-up of Zell's political felo-de-se,
here.
Great Minds Think Alike?
Maybe it was just too easy a reference to use
or maybe it's because Slate employs precognitive plagiarists, but I'm dejected that
Slate's Daniel Gross has written a piece on Richard Perle and Conrad Black with a heading nearly identical to
mine which was
published first.
But Gross's is far better than mine, and focuses more on Perle.
Boo Hoo
David Adesnik of Oxblog who, after exhibiting
considerable hubris, was annihilated
here ,
here,
here, and
here, whines about
"cheap shots":
SALON'S CHEAPSHOT AT OXBLOG: This column just barely dignifies a response. Author Marc Follman cherry-picks a number of humorous posts from the RNC blogging corps and concludes we have no substance.
Turning his sights on OxBlog, Follman mocks my brief post on my still-briefer run-in with Miss America. Then he mocks the humorous opening to my post about Ari Fleischer without noting any of the substance that follows.
Nor Follman refer [sic] to any of my other posts, which I think are fairly substantial. But I'd prefer if you judge that for yourself.
Are they substantial? My judgment can be rendered in one word which David has no doubt been used to hearing in his social life: No.
Pirates of Crapitalism: The Curse of the Black-Perles
As
Seb and
General Glut note,
Captain Lord Conrad Black, embattled owner of a fleet of plunderers, and for far too long direct commander of the
H.M.S. Journalistic Feces, even has standards above those of
Richard Perle.
To gain a firmer purchase on the hierarchy of these standards, and to determine just how poorly all this reflects on Perle, it may be useful to review a bit of
Black's record.
He was a
downsizer extraordinaire:
But whereas Thomson's financial management has been characterized as stingy, Black's is usually described as ruthless. David Radler, current president of Hollinger, and Black's long-time right-hand, has bragged about going at night into a newspaper that they've been planning on buying to count the desks, estimating from that number how many staff should be fired upon acquisition (Winter, Democracy's Oxygen). Radler used to regularly quote from a 19th Century manual on industrial relations that "began with the premise that all employees are slothful, incompetent and dishonest," according to Black (Report on Business, 10/93).
He out-Murdoched Rupert Murdoch himself with regard to injecting his reactionary ideology into the publications he owned:
Black is reputed to be a hands-on owner who is known to "routinely intervene in editorial policy-making," according to Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians. Radler, Hollinger's president, explained the company's editorial policy to Maclean's (2/3/92): "If editors disagree with us they should disagree with us when they're no longer in our employ. The buck stops with ownership. I am responsible for meeting the payroll; therefore I will ultimately determine what the papers say...
[snip]
Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, describes a typical takeover by Black's Hollinger this way (CounterSpin, 8/15/96): "They fire half the staff, they get rid of the environment reporters and the social affairs and the education and health reporters, and they replace them with businesspeople --or they don't replace them at all.... Anyone not singing that very right-wing Newt Gingrich type of...line is soon let go."
Christopher Hitchens, in a 1990 piece for the
London Review of Books, offers this quote from the book
Not Many Dead: Journal of a Year In Fleet Street, by Nicholas Garland:
Alexander reminded me that Black once said that he was prepared to let his editors have a completely free hand except on one subject. He forbade attacks on American Presidents in general and Ronald Reagan in particular.
Hitchens then goes on to relate his experience with Black. After he'd written an unflattering column (this was well before the
Pod People got to Hitch) on Ronald Reagan, Black sent him a note saying that he intended to buy the paper which published Hitchens so that he could put Hitchens, and anyone like him, out of a job. Hitchens laughed the threat off, thinking it was a bluff. Black bought the paper; Hitchens was sacked. A different paper hired Hitchens. Black rang him and said in so many words that he was reprehensible and should be fired from it as well. Apparently Black didn't own enough of
that paper at the time to get his way. Thwarted, Black spread a rumour that Hitchens was a "mental case" and opined that he should be "exterminated."
Stealing from his
employees' retirement funds:
Hollinger International was used as a piggy bank by Black and his wife Barbara Amiel.
Amid the dry financial analysis, Richard Breeden, the former chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission who prepared the report, displays a novelist's eye for the killer observation.
The glimpses he provides of the Blacks' gilded lifestyle would be good material for an Anthony Trollope or a Tom Wolfe. Black, we learn, charged Hollinger International for his wife's handbags, jogging clothes and - a personal favourite - silverware for the couple's private jet.
We also learn of the Beluga caviar and lobster ceviche served at one of her birthday party dinners. Intriguingly, the guests included US news anchor Barbara Walters who recently conducted high-profile interviews with American domestic diva Martha Stewart who has been sentenced to jail for her role in a share deal gone bad.
Also:
The report provided investors and observers of Lord Black's crumbling career as a media tycoon with new details about how the former Hollinger boss and David Radler, a long-time colleague, allegedly colluded to steal $400m from Hollinger or 95 per cent of its adjusted net income between 1997 and 2003.
The allegations span from relatively minor examples of misuse of funds including charging Hollinger $42,870 for Lady Black's birthday party at La Grenouille in New York to large-scale fraud and tax avoidance.
Stealing
from the public:
Lord Black's accounting firm, KPMG, also was squirming at this same time in front of a U. S. Senate committee, for it has been caught reaping millions in fees for sleazy tax shelters it designed to help its rich clients escape paying their taxes.
Quite a record. But evidently pirates like Black believe in such quaint sayings as "honour among thieves." Richard Perle, alas,
does not:
on February 1, 2002, Lord Black seemed to have had enough of Richard Perle, the former US defence adviser who played a key role at Hollinger and Hollinger Digital, its now-defunct venture capital arm.
"I have been consulted about your American Express account which has been sent to us for settlement. It varies from Dollars 1,000 to Dollars 6,000 per month and there is no substantiation of any of the items which include a great many restaurants, groceries and other matters," Lord Black wrote in a letter to Mr Perle. . . .
"As I suspected there is a good deal of nest-feathering being conducted by Richard which I don't object to other than that there was some attempt to disguise it behind a good deal of dissembling and obfuscation," Lord Black wrote in an e-mail to a colleague.
"My instinct told me that (Perle and a partner at Trireme) were trying to smoke one past us."
And:
Several directors of Hollinger International Inc. will come under strong criticism from the special committee of the firm's board when it releases its long-awaited report today into alleged wrongdoing among company executives.
Getting the most heat among the directors will be U.S. Defence department adviser Richard Perle, who will be singled out among the group, sources say.
"Perle is in a category by himself," said one source who is familiar with the contents of the report.
(Also note that
"Dr. Death" Henry Kissinger is mentioned as connected to the Hollinger graft in the
Globe & Mail piece, though he "will not receive the same kind of criticism" as Perle.)
Wow. The extent of Black's piracy boggles a mind already too accustomed to reading about corrupt, filthy-rich Conservatives, and then one must account for the fact that Perle is
worse. To be scruptulously fair, though, and to
really put matters in perspective, as doghouseriley reminds us in the comments to Seb's post, "Perle is the only administration official to actually resign over a conflict of interest. Meaning he's more ethical than everybody who's left."
A
movie about Black, "Citizen Black", is to be soon released. Obviously, the title references "Citizen Kane", Orson Welles's classic based on early twentieth century press baron William Randolph Hearst. But whereas in film Citizen Kane's parting word was "Rosebud" (which was
likely a reference to Hearst's lover Marion Davies's clit), "Citizen Black"'s whispered finale in real life may well be passed through the Dark Lord's parched mealy lips as he answers the jury with, "Perle".
Face It, You'll *Never* Be Cool. Stop Trying.
Despite
constant declarations to the contrary by self-professed hipster Jonah Goldberg (whose high personal level of coolness is epitomised
here,
here, and
here), Conservatives have never been cool and can never be cool. Not on campus, not anywhere; they're dorks who deny their own nature.
The Answer Guy, Tim,
outlines just why and how that is.
Jenna and Barbara are as about as cool as Repugs get, which, of course, is not saying much: vapid sorostitutes who own generically crappy cd and dvd collections, are too rich for their own or anyone else's good, who may be worthy of a few seconds convo around a keg, but are obviously too philistine and vacant to exhibit anything like coolness. However, to be strictly fair, they are about par for the course as far as
Republican "intellectualism" goes. True intellectualism and genuine coolness, of course, go hand in hand.
..which, in turn, brings to mind
the idea of Frenchness: traditionally the apex of coolness/intellectualism. As a country and political entity, of course France is despised to a man by those on the right, and this isn't by any means a
recent development. Some among the right are so bitter and envious of French-cool (and the Left's alliance with it) that they were compelled to "sublimation" by picking up for themselves a sparkling example of
faux-gallique, while the Jonah-type Repugs boil this same essence down to secretly admiring
The Continental, yet remaining bitter that even he is more likely to get laid than they are.
My advice to
sexually frustrated young rightwingers is this: your ideological nitwittery will pay off in time. Someday, you'll be older and powerful and be able to fully enjoy the
Clarence Thomas Lifestyle which
date rapes reaps the benefits of the societal structures your politics continues to make possible. Who knows, maybe even
Ben Shapiro's mother's household kleenex and hand lotion budget will eventually know a certain relief. Someday.
So, drag your fucking Mr. Rogers cardigans out of the closet, put your
Poindexter goggles back on (but take care not to look directly into the sun: you don't want to burn through the back of your skulls), admit that you really listen to Contemporary Christian music, keep publicly condemning oral sex, and in doing so you'll at least be true to yourselves. This "I'm hip and Republican" shit has got to go.
**Edited for insult-embellishment
He's Back!
Tacitus, after going AWOL Tuesday, was either bailed from jail or found his way out of the brothel -- at any rate, he found a universal handcuff key and managed to remove the ball-gag-mask -- and is back to blogging RNC events for
RedState.org.
Needless to say, he hasn't lost his
touch:
Michael Mack, 35-year old chairman of the "Young" Republicans,
Ooooh. The quotes around Young denote high comedy. Wit just doesn't get anymore biting.
was trotted out to speak with all the bloggers. As is its wont,
Guh! He used the "wont" word that
doesn't contain an apostrophe and
isn't a contraction. See, the use of such tastefully appointed english is what makes Tacitus the second coming of Henry Fucking James (if only with regard to style; substantively, Henry James was an anti-imperialist which in Tacitus's world means freedom-hating), at least in the minds of so many
Faulknerian Idiot Man-Children among the right.
RS studiously ignored the prepackaged offering
High standards indeed except for the bothersome fact that the whole fucking purpose of any convention is to push prepackaged offerings. Yet I hope Tacitus stays true to his ideal, for then we will be spared any commentary on the speeches.
Oops, I guess not.
Besides, it was a
lie to begin with.
until our ears pricked up at this exchange:
I smile when I see him use "pricked".
Mack: "I thought Schwarzenegger was positively Reaganesque."
"Wait a minute -- you're describing a man who disagrees with nearly every one of Reagan's positions as Reaganesque?"
"Yes! He was Reaganesque!"
"How is that Reaganesque?"
"He was charismatic! Dynamic!"
"By that criteria, Barack Obama was Reaganesque!"
Pause. Frozen grin. Then, turning away from one of the bloggers with whom he was brought out to speak: "Hey, I'm doing an interview here."
Typical. The only authentic wit (and I'm being generous here on the basis that it came in conversation -- by nature impromptu -- rather than in writing, which insists on a higher standard) in the whole post was stolen from someone else. But then the wit's co-opted point is indeed very much Tacitus's: a telegenic Austrian reactionary, railing, in a
thick Germanic accent,
against liberals and International Organisations, who extolls the virtues of
strength, is somehow just
too moderate for True Blue Republicans. Well, that's nice to know.
Let's see, what else?
Tacitus was
worried that Zell Miller's speech wouldn't be reactionary enough. Remember that he has high standards. Similar to his
fretting over whether Rick "Homos=Dog Fuckers" Santorum's "values", of which Tacitus approves, would be given proper airing during the convention. Plainly, Tacitus wants to put wingnuttery at the forefront of Republicanism.
He shouldn't worry, but then I suppose it's nice to know that he's for at least a kind of "truth in advertising."
Stupid Time, Give Me More Of You!
Yeah, I know ..I haven't been doing my part. I had resolved to cover my choice, Tacitus, of the
RNC bloggers (a.k.a. The Coterie of Jackasses), but what sucks with blogging is that one is so easily distracted. Just as soon as a tissue of lies and stupidity is found, one comes across another and another -- and another, until one is overwhelmed.
For instance, when composing the offering of roccoco snark below, the quality of which is minimal, I did, actually, make an effort to check in on my quarry, only to find a post of such
awesome wrongheadedness, ringing banality, and pompous jackassery that I briefly forgot all about covering anything else. Tacitus is a sly devil: in order to confound bloggers like me who had anticipated deconstructing and defusing a steady supply of small, Convention-themed
landmines of stupidity, Tacitus wisely hid in the mix
clusterbombs of cretinism.
Touche'.
Later, I watched some convention highlights, wrote more on the Frum post, watched
Barbara Bush actually make a decent, amusing speech, then watched the younger Barbara and Jenna make
complete fools of themselves, checked in with the dorks at the
The Corner, quickly observed that
Jonah Goldberg was just barely sentient enough to realise that the Bush sisters had bombed, but still was apparently aroused enough to either soil himself or commence masturbating -- I closed the window before whatever inevitably followed scarred my retinas.
One thing's for sure, there's a lot of html
masturbation going on at the RNC blogbooth; I guess for the authors it's so much better than the discretion and expense of their weekend peepshow regimen.
The guy over at
Fagistan offers some zing.
From alicublog,
we learn that the "Libertarians" find police brutality a laff-riot. Several sneered and snickered when I used to call
self-professed "Libertarians" crypto-fascists, but I feel
like I have reasonable grounds for doing so. Relatedly, I've been reading in and out of two books by
Ward Churchill lately, and sure enough he describes Randianism as crypto-fascist, too. Meanwhile, the "freedom is freedom"
Reason reporters, after getting their ya-yas out in the vicarious joy of witnessing hippie-beatings (or in the anticipation of it), engage in that freedom that
really matters to them:
a shopping spree at Brooks Brothers. Give me fashion or give me death -- and kill the hippies anyway.
After this whirlwind tour, I decided to check in one last time on Tacitus, but I found that he's AWOL. I'm left to wonder if he succumbed to
superior snark, or was mistakenly Gitmo-ed by the NYC Police who didn't believe any "South Carolina" bullshit, but instead assumed that
a hat with a logo of a crescent and Palm-like tree on it meets the Ashcroft Standard of "aiding the terrorists". If so: hoist, petard, poetic justice, and all that.
Or, maybe,
TBOGG's explanation for
his missing RNCblogger is the correct one for AWOL Tacitus. Could be...
*Edit -- Corrected an inappropriate link -- Thanks to
digamma.
**Update on the RNC masturbatory blogging,
Salon dons biohazard suits, performs a forensic analysis. Via
alicublog.
