I’ve concluded that the only way this war can be “won” is if most of the Palestinians in Gaza–and the so-called “West Bank,” too, where HAMAS has a lot of support–are decimated, which the world will never allow Israel to do, and which Livni and Barak (and Olmert) don’t have the guts to do.
Shorter Verbatim Patrick BatemanTony Hadley of Spandau BalletStephen Green:
The only process towards peace is the kind of war one side can’t commit, and the other side won’t.
Oh, Washington Monthly, don’t ever change! Not that you ever could even if you wanted; but I’m just saying that your consistent brand of wishy-washy opinion is like a breath of fresh swamp gas so totally unlike the other vapors wafting from the sewer ditch of Villager consensus.
It’s comforting to know that though the names and faces may change, the product will always be the same. Like, when I saw this post, dated 1-2-09:
I don’t think the piece is completely without merit. The Post doesn’t mention it, but the noteworthy aspect of concerns on the right about the liberals on Obama’s team is that it offers a counter-weight to the opposite criticisms the transition office has heard fairly often — that Obama has snubbed the left and failed to offer progressives any positions of significance.
Jon Chait now has a weekly column in the LA Times. He’s a great choice to be a columnist [...]
Michael Kinsley’s tenure as editorial page editor is now about three months old, and the weekly columnist lineup looks like this so far:
*Two centrist liberals: Chait and Kinsley himself.
*One embarrassing lefty: Robert Scheer.
*One appealing neocon: Max Boot. (As near as I can tell, Boot is the neocons’ best ambassador to the real world. He’s a good writer and smart enough to stay away from the more Strangelovian aspects of neocon looniness.)
*One local color columnist: Patt Morrison.
Overall, this isn’t bad. I’d like to see Kinsley get rid of Scheer and replace him with someone who’s more persuasive, but who knows? Maybe that’s in the works. And how about a weekly blog column? Maybe pick a couple of good blog posts from the previous week and run them side by side or something.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. But then, how could it not be thus? From Cockburn and Silverstein’s Washington Babylon:
[Charlie Peters:]Former Peace Corps bureaucrat who started The Washington Monthly in 1969 on money from Jay Rockefeller, plus a department store heir and a toy magnate. Like The New Republic, the Monthly has given enormous pleasure to Babylon’s elites with its safe essays in neo-liberal iconoclasm. Jack Shafer, then of Washington’s City Paper, once persuasively argued that the worship of Peters by his disciples amounts to a Peters Cult, with its own initiatory rites and sacred mysteries. This stable of acolytes — James Fallows, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Lemann, Mickey Kaus, Gregg Easterbrook, Jonathan Alter, Timothy Noah, Jason DeParle — all carry the Peters mark, a bright boy-ism represented in its most undiluted and irksome form in Kinsley. Main characteristics of breed are extreme political orthodoxy, sedulous careerism, smugness.
Not that one has to convert to get a WM gig. Let’s say you’re a bright boy who feels besieged by all the skankified hippies in your UC Santa Cruz* milieu. Well, if you also write stuff like, say, this:
Here’s what I would propose, the Realignment Party. This party would seek to break down the division between Left and Right, much like the book The Radical Center does. Both sides have good ideas, worthwhile ends, and good methods on their issues but, because they are forced to carve out a distinct position on everything, when they get to an issue late they often end up with very bad ideas, methods, and ends because the smart ground is already occupied. That’s why the Left wants to liberate Palestine but can’t advocate for the liberation of Iraq, the Right’s already got it.
…then you’ve got a shiny new internship waitin’ for ya, from which you can graduate to bigger venues of Sensible Liberalism. Or as John Emerson put it, though slightly more sourly about another WM alum:
I wrote in response to this post by Kevin Drum, in which he said “I continue to believe that on a list of problems with the American media, ideological bias barely cracks the top ten.” (Remember, guys — in theory, Kevin is on our side.)
This kind of post is why I think that Kevin is worthless, and a good part of the reason why I gave up on blogging, the Democratic Party, and the US.
Kevin thinks what he thinks, and he’s always thought what he thought, and please don’t disturb him with reality.
The Washington Monthly has had this attitude written into its charter for decades. No one connected with that journal is allowed to think differently. (Though Kevin already thought that way and isn’t being coerced.)
Kevin, you ******, ********* ***** ** ****, it’s NOT SYMMETRICAL. And everyone knows it’s not, except you and other ****** of your ilk. There’s a hefty conservative media in this country, and there’s a big moderate / neutral media in this country, but there’s only a puny liberal media. A little radio, almost no TV or cable, and no national newspaper.
Kevin doesn’t see this because he thinks that he is the real left and that everyone to his left is just plain crazy.
It’s hopeless, guys. Bush won, and Kevin hasn’t even noticed yet.
P.S.
I just realized that part of the problem is that Kevin is unable to understand the idea that there could be “neutral bias” or “centrist bias”. To him bias is only right / left bias, and he’s very happy that the left is as feeble as it is, because that means half the bias is gone.
Remember, it’s not just a magazine, it’s a mentality. Our elected Democratic officials are very “Washington Monthly,” which is why
[I]f the Senate had magically gone 100-0 Democratic in the last election, Reid would build a totem Republican out of papier-mache and feces just so he could ritually cave to it.
* Corrected as per Banana Slug expert Pinko Punko’s suggestion.
Can’t promise anything. It’s been tough for all of us paycheck collectors (I had to focus on not getting sacked over the last few months.*
What I can promise from this space is this:
- Relentless procrastination
- Failed marriages
- Hours and hours of Boston hate and Barry love
- Less Retardo, more HTML
- A disgust with God in all his Earthly and non-existent manifestations
- Clif in all his prodigulous, talented glory
- No mention of the word ’settlements’ until Minute 47 of any and all hour-long Sunday gabfests whose subject is Gaza … if you’re lucky
- Shit moats
*UPDATERAPE: Closed parentheticals will cost youse extra
The reason why the terrorists hate the United States is that the villains in movies made by liberal Hollywood are corporations, the CIA, the FBI and the Armed Forces. That’s why I’ve just created a new website documenting how conservatives are oppressed in Hollywood.
Never mind that for years I’ve asserted that Iran is a greater menace than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the legions of Mordor combined; now I’m telling you that it’s a paper tiger! What better time, then, to launch an invasion of Syria and Persia than right now?
Mark Steyn dutifully quotes Steve Forbes; both demand that the Obama Administration copy the Irish government’s corporate tax scheme which they allege is totally awesome. Or else:
The growing gap between US corporate rates and other developed nations is a massive disincentivization for real human beings to start and grow a business here. And for those already here it encourages the kind of short-term thinking that leads to Bailoutistan and American sclerosis.
ZOMG I should just pack up now and go to the land of my ancestors, a near-glibertarian paradise where sound non-government has enriched not only the citzenry but, as per the Laffer curve, the government as well! Oh yes where Guinness falls from the sky and Lucky Charms grow on trees…
RedState has officially passed over whatever glory years it ever had and has prematurely entered the “Smell the Glove” phase of its career. Brandon Friedman at VoteVets remarks:
Like many chickenhawks who struggle with what it means to be a man in the modern era, Erickson and the “soldiers” in his budding “Strike Force” have again tried to imitate serving in the military without actually having to don a uniform, pick up a weapon, or sacrifice much of anything at all. However, by creating this make-believe world in which RedState activists are members of a military-like “Strike Force,” they’re actually quite a lot like the Dungeons and Dragons fans LARPers in the video below pretending to be wizards, basilisks, and gorgons.
So not only has RedState designed a military unit crest, but they’ve now painted themselves as hopeless dorks, lunging clumsily for political relevance with a ham-handed attempt at jumpstarting a field organization.
I concur with this analysis, although I’d say it’s a bit unfair to the LARPers, who actually do get some form of real exercise running around in the woods and who do have some experience in weapons training, even if it’s only with foam swords and spell packets. Put it to you like this: you give me the choice of going into a fight with an average LARPer or Dan Riehl, you bet your ass I’m taking the LARPer.
[Thanks to whichever commenter pointed this out to me in the comments a while back.]
In the grand tradition of Lee Siegel, it seems that Andrew Keen has discovered that the absolute worstest thing evar in the world is to let the Little People express their opinions by sending them over the Intert00bz. Indeed, giving people an online forum to share their views is the most certain way to bring about the return of the Nazis. No, that’s what he really thinks:
On December 6, Barack Obama announced his intention to fund a massive public works program of somewhere between $400 and $700 billion which will create enough jobs to avert the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. But I fear that one element in Obama’s well-intentioned infrastructure plan—his goal of providing all Americans with broadband Internet access—might one day be seen as inadvertently laying the foundations for a return to fascism, the political catastrophe of the 1930’s.
In the Europe of the 1930s, representative democracy’s abject failure to confront the rage of mass unemployment and dislocation led to the rise of fascist organizations such as the Spanish Falangists, the German National Socialists, and the Romanian Iron Guard. What the interwar fascists provided—with their messianic leaders, their torchlight parades, their xenophobic propaganda—was a placebo to the hopelessness that had enveloped ordinary people’s lives.
The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.
Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.
The idea here is pretty basic: the Little People are far too dim to think on their own and reach their own conclusions, and they will inevitably turn into Nazis unless a class of Enlightened Beings oversees the information that they are allowed to consume.
Now, I don’t buy into the Ole Perfesser’s “Army of Davids” theory that we can replace the traditional media with the bed-wetting loonies who read his blog, but I also don’t think that people such as Keen should be allowed to appoint themselves the Grand Overseers of Our Enlightened Discourse, as he so obviously proposes doing. Some balance is needed, my friends. Continuing:
Now fast forward to the digital world of 2008 and what even the normally cheerful Economist has predicted will be a “long and deep recession”. Like in the 30s, we are faced with a systemic crisis not only to free market capitalism but also possibly to representative democracy. The 2008 economic meltdown is beginning to rival the 1929 Great Crash for its catastrophic impact on the lives of ordinary people. The United Nations has described today’s world economy as the “weakest since the ‘30s”. And 2009 promises to be worse, much much worse, with the U.N. predicting that the entire world economy will actually contract for the first time since those bygone days, and Princeton’s Nobel prizewinning economist Paul Krugman forecasting that American unemployment may rise to the “double digits”.
In the Thirties, mass unemployment lead to the catastrophe of fascism; in today’s crisis, I fear that it will lead to digital fascism.
And what would this dread face of digital fascism look like, you ask? Behold:
Oh deary. It seems that Michelle Malkin is (shock) outraged again because some nasty people have been saying that right-wing bloggers produce nothing but crazy-assed bullshit. When pressed for counterexamples, she gives us this:
Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee/Pajamas Media published several original reports and scoops — including the op-ed the NYTimes refused to run and an interview with FBI informant/Weather Underground insider Larry Grathwohl, and early in the year, the results of a massive FOIA request related to the Beauchamp controversy.
Robert Stacy McCain, a two-decade newspaper reporter/editor-turned-blogger, provided campaign reporting on the road from Hillary in Harrisburg, Pa., and in Shepherdstown, W.Va., to the Libertarian convention in Denver, to John McCain in Pennsylvania, back to Denver for the DNC, and in Ohio and Pennsylvania for Sarah Palin.
Internet journalist/blogger and Little Green Footballs regular Zombie (not “conservative” per se, but rather anti-sharia/anti-jihad/anti-anti-American/anti-extremist Left) did extraordinary work digging up documents related to Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist Bill Ayer’s relationship — most notably, unearthing the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire and Obama’s review of Ayer’s book on the juvenile court system.
See, yeah.
The insane, paranoid rantings of the Gun-CounterGomer, racist ex-Moonie Times reporters, and some anonymous dude at LGF do not constitute “reporting” in the sense that we’ve typically come to define the term. No, I don’t care how many times you’ve kerned Obama’s birth certificate to prove that he’s Chuck D’s love child, or whether you’ve written a 50,000-word manifesto analyzing the linguistic similarities between Obama’s DNC speech and NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton.” Everything you guys write is tainted by the simple fact that you’re crazy assholes. If you’d like your work to be taken seriously by anyone who isn’t on your own personal LISTSERVs and Twitter accounts, the first step is to stop being crazy assholes. If you enjoy being crazy assholes and don’t want to give up the habit, that’s cool, but don’t expect to earn much respect from normal people. Make sense?
OK, so, like, get this, man. Y’know how the Israelis have been having, like, these problems with these alleged “people” called the Palestinians for all these years because they’ve been occupying their land? Well check it, daddy-o, I’ve got the perfect solution: let’s hand the West Bank and Gaza over to Jordan and Egypt and make *them* deal with the mess! This shit is so brilliant, I can’t believe it took me 12 hits of chronic to come up with it!
Yeah, I should be back blogging again soon, btw. Wingnuttery reached a critical mass during the 2008 presidential election and I haven’t been able to bring myself to read much more of it ever since.
UPDATE: Oh joyous day! I just discovered that Bolton now has another op-ed published today, this one in the New York Times! Let’s do it justice and shorten it:
Hey, remember when me and my buddies used to argue for giving the president unlimited power to do anything he wanted? Welp, we’re starting to rethink that now that Surrendercrat Barack HUSSEIN Osama is in charge.
Erick the Dim, who’s kinda like Hagar the Horrible except with less hair but more brain damage, is setting off on an errand:
The Vice President’s office has invited me up to D.C. this week to sit down with Vice President Cheney for an “exit interview” looking back over the past eight years.
Above: “Iraq puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.”
Let’s give Erick some substantive questions to ask Mr. Cheney during those moments when the fluffing stops because the pain in his jaw overwhelms even the most sycophantic Viking’s resolve to pleasure mass-murdering psychopaths:
What’s the proper time and setting for microwaving a live puppy?
The gun, that guy’s face, you know what I’m talking about — didja do it because you were trying to help him shoo away a fly, or because you just wanted to see what it felt like to shoot somebody?
Can you describe what an infant’s flesh actually tastes like? And don’t say “like chicken.”
Can you provide any insight into the rituals involved in the morning White House prayer meetings? Is it true that you and the Cabinet form a circle around a nude and squatting Karl Rove who masturbates on an inverted pentagram while you lead the chants to Dark Lord Moloch?
Isn’t it true that you bear responsibility for the shooting of not only many of the sheriffs but also many of the deputies… and commissioners, and produce peddlars, babysitters, street beggars, newborn babies, postal workers, taxi drivers, nursing home residents, doctors, nurses, kindergarten teachers, kindergarten students, suspension bridge engineers, stevedores, ziggurats, zebu cattle, and date palms of Iraq?
How did you survive your fall down the shaft and escape the station before Wedge and Lando commenced their attack on the Death Star’s main reactor?
Is it true that you believe your theory of executive power allows you to apply an electric cattle prod to the genitals of Democratic Senate staffers whenever the mood strikes?
Sometimes, when floating around your “undisclosed location” in a suspensor suit, rappin with your demented neocon Mentats, do you ever feel the need to pull out some random servant’s heartplug? Couldn’t you just decide to have a cupcake, instead?
Does it anger you that, despite your best efforts, Henry Kissinger has still managed to mass murder more small brown people of extranational provenance than you?
Is that some Bell’s Palsy thing or have you always favored one side when biting the heads off kittens?
When you’re found guilty at The Hague, will you accept your sentence stoically? Or will you go the smuggled cyanide pill, middle-finger-to-justice route? Or, true to your Texan roots, will you flee with a high-powered rifle to the nearest clock tower and force INTERPOL to take you down in final blaze of sociopathy?
Once upon a time, in an imaginary land far, far away, there lived a hillbilly Viking named Erick “The Dim” Erickson. Erick the Dim had been so badly brain-damaged by an unfortunate accident with a musk ox that he believed, contrary to all evidence, that right-wingers were subject to brutal and unique oppression, particularly with respect to being hired by newspapers to write blogs
Well, we really don’t need any reminder as to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but I’ll remind you anyway.
Greg Sargent was with the left-wing Talking Points Memo. Now he is with the Washington Post.
I’m sure Greg Sargent is good at what he does, but I’m also sure the Washington Post would not even consider hiring someone directly from the right-of-center blogosphere.
Erick’s unfortunate accident, which involved a swift kick by a musk ox annoyed with his desperate attempts at a romantic encounter, apparently erased from his badly battered brain all memory of . . .
That’s Ben Domenech, who co-founded Red State with Erick and who was hired by the Washington Post to write his own blog for the paper. He got this gig from the Post despite his having called Coretta Scott King a “communist.” Domenech’s tenure at the Post was short-lived after it was revealed that he was a serial plagiarist.
Once a few Red State commenters mentioned Ben as a glaring counterexample, Erick offered up his own alternate view of reality:
He was tossed quickly after lefty outrage — and let’s be honest, it had more to do with the lefty outrage than later revelations. They weren’t going to stand by him the minute the phones started wringing.
“Later revelations.” Hehe. Apparently these “revelations” are so inconsequential that Erick dare not even speak their name. Ben didn’t get dumped because he was a conservative; he was dumped because he stole shit. Just like we don’t mock Erickson because he’s conservative; we mock him because he’s dumber than a broken-down dump truck.
So-called ‘realists’ naively assume that, when they enter dialogue with our enemies, they are engaging other human beings — which just goes to show that they have no place in the foreign policy business.
As is so often the case when dealing with the writings of long-time neoconmen (and Ledeen has been a menace to civilization for thirty years now), it’s hard to know where to begin, how to approach the clusterfuck of insanity: it’s a Gladwellian instance where one’s first, most superficial, instinctive response — horror, disgust, revulsion — is correct, but how? — and why? I think Ledeen’s work inspires negative-overload because we of the lefty persuasion are hardwired to identify and then furiously react to what is Orwellian. And Ledeen’s shit is definitely Orwellian, with the telltale and de riguer touch of Strauss: which is just a pseudo-intellectual way of saying it’s so god-awful fucking backwards.
“Realists” are conservatives — especially in the dictionary sense of the term, but also in the political sense. Ledeen is far, radically far, to their right. “To the right of Attila the Hun” is a joke-cliche’, but Ledeen is self-admittedly far to the right of Henry Kissinger, a man whose genocidal tendencies can at least be mentioned in the same breath as Attila’s. In typical Overton Window fashion, Ledeen paints conservative “realists” as hopelessly naive idealists: Brent Scowcroft as a Quaker. Thus he accomplishes two goals: carving a spot out for himself as the true, serious rightwinger, worthy of being listened to, and at the same time, he pushes the Left off the cliff. So much for meta strategy, now for the actual substance.
Ledeen says the “realists” shouldn’t assume that “our enemies” are human beings who will respond rationally to traditional diplomatic negotiation. Typically, he’s arguing in the negative; he doesn’t say what he considers a sensible alternative. So one has to “discover” the implied alternative, an easy enough task. What does Michael Ledeen really mean? Answer: assume that “our enemies” are irrational and subhuman, which in turn implies… yes, “faster, please” to the preferred and completely typical neocon proposal to exterminate the brutes. Yet because of the style in which he argues, plausible deniability (albeit of the flimsiest sort) is maintained. Say what Ledeen really means, and he splutter-feigns outrage at your ’strawman.’
He wasn’t always so careful. Back in the day, in the infamous eleventy-billion word article Ledeen wrote for Partisan Review (which ultimately divided the magazine by zero and was so toxic that it inspired poor Daniel Bell and Diana Trilling both to throw in the towel on the neoconservative movement), he argued:
[A]fter citing a French conservative about the necessity of “breaking the law from time to time,” Ledeen proposes a change in two laws that “forbid us” to conduct a minimal “counter-terrorism policy”: “One is a law that prohibits American officials from working with murderers; the other is an executive order, dating to 1975, prohibiting any official of the American government to conduct, order, encourage or facilitate assassination.” — quoted from Sidney Blumenthal’s Our Long National Daydream.
Another point, probably useless to make but I’ll do it anyway, concerns Ledeen’s consistency. Back in the Reagan Era, Ledeen, like nearly all neoconservatives, whole-heartedly signed on to the much-dread and now thankfully much-dead Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s formula that the United States could and should do business with “authoritarian” regimes (right-wing tyrants) not only because of their own supposed rationality and alleged ability to reform, but so as to sabotage the nefarious global designs of “totalitarian” regimes (left-wing, i.e. communist or “communist” tyrants, which could not, it was thought, ever reform). In the post I’ve shortered above, as in so much of his writing over the last decade or so, Ledeen has argued what is effectively the opposite: for if we accept his premise that the Iranian mullahacracy is a tyranny, what is it but a right-wing, religious one?
Still MOAR
Israel-Palestine is much in the news lately. Though this is a few years old, it’s quintessential Ledeen on the subject. In other words, it too implies that the first, best and Final Solution for ‘the enemy’ (in this case, it’s probably the Palestinians but he could mean any Arab group or, considering his obsessions, Persians) is extermination. Here are the nutjob grafs:
Yet, as our rabbi reminded us last Sabbath, many Jewish scholars believe the Israelites en route to the Holy Land performed an even greater sin when they believed ten of their twelve spies who said that the inhabitants of the land of Canaan were too strong, and that any effort to conquer them was doomed to failure. The other two, Joshua and Caleb, said that victory was possible.
For permitting themselves to become paralyzed by fear, for accepting a misleading intelligence assessment from the ten instead of listening to the clear-eyed reports of Joshua and Caleb, for refusing to confidently move forward against their enemies, an entire generation of Jews was compelled to wander in the wilderness.
[...]
The failure to pursue victory doomed the Jews of that generation to wander in the desert. They were denied freedom in the Promised Land, having proven themselves unworthy of it. I find that story doubly important for us, both because of its historical and moral significance, and because of its contemporary relevance. We are challenged to fight an enemy who wishes to deny us our freedom, and enslave us. We hear voices repeating the false intelligence of the ten, telling us that all is lost, that there is no hope. Iraq is lost, they say, and Iran must be appeased. I was just invited to a conference on “how to live with a nuclear Iran.” There will be more such voices, perhaps even a consensus that we cannot win, and must accept our doom.
Joshua and Caleb saw more deeply, realized that their war could be won, and their cause was just, and refused to surrender to the “consensus” of the ten. In the end, they were proven correct, the war was won, and the Jews became a free people.
The smear on modern Jewish “peaceniks” is explicit; more to the exterminationist point is what Ledeen leaves unstated while assuming that approving readers and fellow AEI “scholars” know the rest of the story; he knows they can complete the toxic analogy, and surely he is right about that. What did Joshua and Caleb advise doing to the (indigenous, it must be said) “inhabitants of Canaan”? What, indeed, did the Israelites end up doing to the Moabites and Amalekites? Anyone? Oh, you, geeky kid on the front row who doesn’t know you’re gonna get called an anti-Semite? Yes, it’s true. The correct answer is indeed divinely-assisted genocide. By the way, Ledeen, David Frum, Marty Peretz, and all the PODhoretz People have just denounced you as an anti-Semite. Anyway, everyone in Israel is familiar with analogies to the Amalekites (it’s sort of like “going Godwin” here* but exponentially worse and with a social cootie factor of bazillion); the only people who do it consistently are the Kahanist scumbags who amount to the Jewish version of the KKK; even most Likudists think it’s beyond extreme, but for Ledeen it’s just another day at the office.
In short, Michael Ledeen should suck shit and explode.
*Yes, I know that I have frequently “gone Godwin” here, in this very post, for instance.
What better way to start off the New Year than to wander over to the House of Gay Shame and see what’s up. If we’re lucky, we might find Bruce and Dan explaining why the criminalization of sodomy wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Or maybe they are planning a gay field trip to a Mormon temple service to show the Mormons that some gays are actually thankful that the Mormons have worked so hard against gay marriage, caffeinated beverages and champagne brunches.
Yoohoo! Anybody home? It’s pretty deserted at over at Gay Patriot Head(not-that-kind)quarters. Looks like they had some kind of awards ceremony. They left some godawful banner still hanging over the podium. (Who does their graphics work? Ace o’Spades?). Apparently they named Pamela “Tits You Can Believe In” Geller as the Très Très Mucho Molto Grande Fabuloso Divinely Fierce Conservative Blogress Diva MMIX.
Let’s leave a nice little note in their guest book:
I had scarcely left that little note when Dan came into the room screaming “You bitch, give me that book!!” Then he grabbed the book, ripped out the page with my comment, tore it into tiny pieces and swallowed the pieces one by one, and then threw the book on the floor. What a drama queen.
So I picked it up from the floor and wrote this
Which, of course, provoked an even more violent reaction from Dan. You’d think he’d get tired of eating so much paper. . . .
Meanwhile, over at the House of No Shame, Pamela, knowing the election was rigged, stopped spewing genocidal fantasies about Arabs just long enough to grab the award and pretend like she earned it.
But the real victim here is Kathy Shaidle. Why, we have to wonder, would she be disqualified by too many leftie votes but Pamela wasn’t? Maybe we should keep asking Dan that. After all, he can only eat so much paper.
Above: “What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong?”
[F]or some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.
And what the hell - because I haven’t gone down the Godwin road in quite a while, might I suggest….
The New York Times won’t review my book, which is yet another data point confirming my general thesis about the fundamental intolerance of the Left that fears and loathes courageous dissenters like me.
So, uh… hey baby. You’re lookin all hot an stuff. Whazzup?
Above:Hubba hubba, damn str8.
“Atheistic fagg0rtz who keep tryin to kill baby Jesus, Redardo*! Let me tell you all about it!”:
Our country is facing a spiritual crossroads that could spell the end of traditional marriage and family life. Christianity is being encroached upon by those within the gay community. Many of these people are “part and parcel” of the same crowd who wish to remove God from the public arena because our Creator has plenty to say about their “chosen lifestyle.” If their lifestyle were not by choice, God would not call homosexuality a sin.
Well, I’m ok with our country facing a spiritual crossroads so long as it isn’t the same one where I sold my soul to Satan for a box of McNuggets and the ability to freakin’ shred on my banjo. But I’m totally with you about the homos’ practicing prior restraint on Jebus’s right to free speech, though I disagree with you on the reasoning. I know from watching Dogma that when humans hear God speak, their heads explode. I’m certain that that’s really why homos want to shut God up: they are prissy neat freaks who don’t want to deal with the mess. And as for your point on sin and choice, right on. Like with original sin: everyone chooses to accept responsibility for Adam’s screw-up, amirite?
The good news is that people who are caught up in this sin can change and free themselves with the help of God. Stephen Bennett was a homosexual man. He has been happily married to his wife Irene for over 15 years. They have two wonderful children. The Bennett family has traveled the world sharing the Lord’s story of redemption and forgiveness. God is the re-creator of lives and true change.
Pbbt. That’s all your God can do? Well, we lefties, when we toke “pray” at our herbaceous “altar” in worship and call on our Gods (Karl Marx, Hecate the Goddess of Abortion, Carl Sagan, Wavy Gravy, to name but a few in the pantheon), we get much better results: not only can we change our sexual-orientation (usually from bi-curious to bi-fabulous), we can also change our gender and the status of our pregnancy. For instance, back when you flirted with me, I was a pregnant lesbian. Now I’m just a dude with a bag of stem cells (for sale if you want some). I’m considering going back to being a woman; this time as a pretend-straight one as I’ve always wanted to be a housewife. Admit it, Marie, this totally turns you on. Oh, the fluidity of identity! And just to think that the seed was planted in my childhood when I watched way too many Eurythmics videos.
Militant homosexual activists want to destroy the meaning of marriage, and by extension, the institution itself.
But heterosexuals already done that!
They have advocates within the media. The president-elect is definitely sympathetic to the gay community.
Be assured that Barack Obama will do whatever it takes to change our society, so it resembles that of Sweden and Denmark.
ZOMFG anything but that! Don’t they eat children over there? I mean, before they all commit suicide cuz they are so depressed by not having any poor people to kick in the teeth that they find life not worth living?
If same-sex marriage ever becomes accepted as law, it will give schools license to teach our children sexual perversion. America’s children will become even more brainwashed within the public school system. The indoctrination of our children will be presented to the parents as learning the skills to become tolerant of others whose families are different from their own. As the manipulation progresses, little Jeannie and Bobby will be led to believe it’s perfectly fine to grow up and have the choice of falling in love with their own sex and become married to one another.
Dear God no! I will stand with you, Marie, athwart permissiveness, yelling, “stop!” Cuz nothing’s worse than allowing a whole generation grow up without repressing its nature. Sadistic liberals, wanting to FORCE people to live without baggage: they really know how to take all the fun out of things.
Since homosexuals are unable to procreate, they will increase their population by tampering with children’s minds.
This is the best ever new twist on the wingnuts’ traditional “demographic crisis” schtick. Love it. You’ve made me turgid, Marie. Or is it moist? [Checks] Turgid. But next week it might be the other. [Wink!]
There is no excuse for being uninformed about the gay lifestyle. “Gay” has become an oxymoron, using a word which by definition expresses being happy to describe a lifestyle that is sad. Gays have chosen to live their lives on the periphery of disaster. They have no assurance of themselves. Suicide, drugs, and health issues have led many to an early death.
Word! I too have noticed this irony. I know when I’m at home watching noted gaywads like Richard Simmons and Christopher Lowell on the teevee, the first thing I’m struck by is how utterly depressed they seem. I mean, what else could explain their subdued personalities? And when I’m um, observing the local leather daddy parade, I’m always confronted by these deeply unhappy “gay” men whose first words to me are invariably some take on “oh my god I’m a homo and that means I’m gonna get AIDS and die alone!!!” Which is only true, amirite? After all, Paul Lynde and Liberace died alone and pathetic, which is totally different from the way every heterosexual in the history of the universe has shuffled off his or her mortal coil. So I’m wit ya on the truth in advertising point, Marie. Instead of “gay,” homos should absolutely call themselves “dreary.”
People of faith must take a moral stand and draw down evil. We can no longer turn away.
Amen to that, Marie, but we have to be careful about it. The last time I leaned over my desk to scribble down evil, some homo tried to dry hump me. Oh, it was wonderful awful. Um, if you want to get by my desk here I can show you how it happened…
The gay community has obviously decided to take on a battle they will never be able to win in the courts of heaven.
Yeah, let’s just see some fagg0tr0id shyster try that case! Jesus will be all like, “Thy homos, thoust suit is dismissedeth with extreme prejudice, but I love thee!” And the homo lawyer will be all like, “Oh Jethuth! You bang that gavel tho hard it maketh me tho hot! Put it in my butt!” And then Jesus will go like “Burneth in Hellfires, ye unclean beasts!” And then Marie and Redardo live happy ever after, even when Redardo gets another sex change and proposes gay marriage.
A private investigator in Hawaii has uncovered the divorce decree for Barack Obama’s father and mother, which indicates they had “one child under the age of eighteen, born in Kenya.”
While the (first) punchline isn’t quite at the level of the one referenced above, it’s damn close:
Hale does admit to incomplete certainty of his investigator’s work until he receives it, partially due to the PI’s accent, the telephone connection, and his slight hearing impediment.
Awesome. And in time for the new year, the post was updated today:
In his 7:45pm Plains Radio broadcast, this last night, Ed Hale backed down from his prior assertion of having gained even uncertain information about the Barack Sr. / Stanley Ann divorce decree containing language referring to Barack Jr. as being born in Kenya. Instead, Hale referred to an apparently tricky recollection… of an indeterminate person… referring to such a document’s generally referring to the place of birth of the children of the divorced parents. That is not what I heard from Mr. Hale on the 31st.
Seems like there are a lot of accents and hearing impediments going around these days.
Mark Steyn thinks he’s quite witty. To give credit where it’s due, he’s half right.
Above: analogy - you’re doing it wrong
Adventures in Analogy [Mark Steyn]
Alas, Dr Mohamed Elmasry, founder of the Canadian Islamic Congress, failed in his campaign to rid the Great White North of my hate speech, so he has now turned his attention to other targets — the Zionist stormtroopers:
Many contemporary historians have aptly compared Gaza to the cramped and destitute Warsaw Ghetto of World War II.
But those “contemporary historians” don’t know the half of it:
Gaza has, in fact, been reduced to a new Auschwitz: the only difference – a nightmarish irony — is that Jews are now playing the role of Hitler’s ruthless SS.
Er, right. And that would make Hamas the concentration camp guards?
(via The Montreal Muslim News. Proud motto: “We don’t support the troops.”)
Now, Mohammed Elmasry is hyperbolic here (which doesn’t necessarily make him wrong; it only makes him hyperbolic), and I haven’t the slightest bit of interest in weighing in on the Israel-Hamas situation. My New Year’s Resolution for Good Happy Success involves attempting to ignore most of the genuine evil in the world for a while so I can hopefully stop feeling like I should send a condolence card every time someone I know has a new baby. I just want to have some fun mocking Mark Steyn for the amazingly epic fail he’s just committed.
See, Steyn thinks that Elmasry’s position is inherently risible because, in order for Elmasry’s analogy to be properly extended, Hamas would have to be the concentration camp guards on its own people! And that’s ridiculous, right? Because that never happened, right?
Kapo was a term used for certain prisoners who worked inside Nazi concentration camps during World War II in various lower administrative positions. The term is sometimes used to describe self-hating Jews and Jewish anti-Semites.
The German word also means “foreman” and “non-commissioned officer”, and is derived from French for “Corporal” (fr:Caporal) or the Italian word capo’. Kapos received more privileges than normal prisoners, towards whom they were often brutal. They were often convicts who were offered this work in exchange for a reduced sentence or parole, however they were usually murdered and replaced with a new batch of prisoners at regular intervals.
My lord! So concentration camp prisoners were used as camp guards? Well, never mind, then.
Is it a good analogy? Is it a bad analogy? Who cares! It’s just nice to start the new year off with a reliable idiot like Mark Steyn confirming his idiocy for the whole world to see. Helps to restore my faith in the order of the universe a bit.
