Hey, Mike, There’s This Bridge I Can Get You A Really Good Deal On!
Michael Medved is the most gullible human being on the planet, bar none. But it’s a special, focused gullibility: Whatever the U.S. says about its history, its present actions, or its foreign policy aims is, on Planet Medved, always 100% completely true no matter what. If he ever manages to finagle his position as a Townhall columnist into an invitation to a White House press luncheon where they serve actual shit sandwiches (instead of the rhetorical shit sandwiches they’re always serving), Medved will be the guy frantically trying to get the attention of the waitstaff so he can let them know that they might want to check the containers of Nutella in the kitchen, because he thinks they might have spoiled.
Medved’s latest piece of tripe has been up for a couple of days now, but it’s just such an epic, tour de force, grand “Gone With the Wind” size exercise in stupidity and willful ignorance that it’s taken me this long to digest the whole thing and come out on the other side. It is a sweeping narrative of all of American history, told through a lens of pure buncombe. If DW Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” could be described by our twentieth president as “history writ with lightning”, perhaps we could call this “history writ with pure applesauce” – and for much the same reasons.
In 1959, the hilarious Peter Sellers comedy “The Mouse That Roared” charmed audiences around the world by mocking America’s long-standing reputation for prodigious generosity – especially to nations who’ve fought the United States and lost. The movie (based on a droll and sprightly novel by Leonard Wibberley) tells the story of the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick that decides to cope with imminent financial collapse by declaring war on the U.S. The Grand Duchess and her prime minister (both played by Sellers) unleash the full might of a Fenwickian expeditionary force for an invasion of New York City, storming Manhattan with a twenty-man army equipped with medieval armor and bows and arrows. The scheming Europeans naturally plan in advance for a speedy, abject surrender, after which they expect to benefit from the bountiful foreign aid and reconstruction assistance that America traditionally lavishes on its beaten foes.
Why, yes, Michael, being beaten by the United States in a war IS just as hilarious as it appears to be in the movies! There’s nothing quite as hysterical as having white phosphorus incendiary devices come streaming out of the sky into your living room, and having a stream of daisy cutters come hurtling down the main street of your town is a guaranteed laugh a minute.
Dude, stuff like that is called “satire” for a reason. D’you ever get the feeling that if Medved ever read “A Modest Proposal”, he’d be stuck wondering just why people didn’t actually try out the very clever ideas that nice Mr. Swift came up with? “The Mouse that Roared” works as comedy because it’s a movie war, not a real war, much like Seller’s other oh-so-notably pro-U.S. foreign policy film “Dr.Strangelove ” works as comedy because – with it being movie make believe and not real – you never have to see the carnage wrought by the bombs dropped.
You can see already that I’m not going to make it through this in one piece, can’t you? I’m already reduced to explaining to a film critic that movies are make believe, not reality.
Critics of the United States and its role in the world prefer to argue their point of view by focusing on specific instances of American bullying or brutality, recounting their favorite horror stories from Indonesia or Nicaragua, Vietnam or Chile, the Philippines or Iraq – or any of two dozen other places around the globe where American intervention or involvement imperfectly exemplified the nation’s self-professed high ideals.
Yes, when you are making an omelette of global wealth and harmony, you might have to break a few national eggs to get there. Okay, maybe twenty or thirty eggs. Okay, maybe that even adds up to one out of every six eggs in the entire planetary basket – what are you, a math major? When you look at how great life is nowadays in Nicaragua, or Chile, or the Philippines, you can see it was all totally worth it, right?
The leftist insistence on concentrating on individual examples of U.S. “perfidy” emphasizes details over destiny, arcane disputes over isolated, long-ago blunders above big picture considerations of the overall impact of U.S. policy. Yes, it’s possible to argue that the United States (and our British allies) harmed democratic development (and our own long-term interests) by undermining the leftist Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, but that doesn’t justify (or even explain) the current Iranian designation of the U.S. as “The Great Satan” or the cheering crowds at Teheran rallies who lustily chant “Death to America!”
Why are you bothering him with details? Details are for losers. Destiny is for winners. All those “blunders” (that Medved never gets around to explaining who made) are isolated and long ago, and they shouldn’t detract from big picture considerations. And I’m flabbergasted at the idea that the 1953 CIA-led overthrow of the Mossadegh government does nothing to explain the rise of revolutionary Iranian sentiment. Perhaps it’s because in order to make sense of that, you have to be able to follow a causal chain of events past two instances, and that just taxes Medved’s powers of reasoning past their limits? You know, it’s not: overthrow of Mossadegh: “Death to America”; it’s: overthrow of Mossadegh: direct rule of a Shah who used secret police, put political dissenters in jail, and generally relied on U.S. support to hold unpopular power: Iranian people finally so pissed off they’d accept the rule of anyone else except the Shah: Iranian Revolution: “Death to America”.
Those who insist on slandering the United States seek ugly close-ups of twisted trees but won’t step back to consider the forest. They lack perspective, and ignore context. They refer to dwell on the harsh impact of specific American initiatives or policies, without acknowledging the Republic’s undeniably benevolent and beneficial impact on the world at large during every era in our history.
Yep, you read that right. Medved just said that our impact on the entire world has always been benevolent, every time we did anything in any era of American history. Well, that settles it for me, then. I’m going to go into work on Monday and quit my job, because we obviously don’t need people who teach American history anymore. In fact, teaching American history is bad, because it’s just about getting hung up on details and doing close-ups; what kids actually need is just to be told that it is now, and has always been, American destiny to be an undeniably benevolent and beneficial influence on the entire world throughout our entire history. What else does anyone need to know?
Well, Michael Medved thinks that there’s more we still need to know about how totally awesome everything that America has ever done has been, and he’s going to break it down for us into small, bite-sized categories with catchy titles that work so well for the sort of writing he’s best at, like movie reviews.
ALLIGNMENT WITH AMERICA BENEFITS, RATHER THAN BURDENS, THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD
See? And this, of course, is because America is the most awesomest thing evar!!!!!ELEVENTYONE!!! and not because America, like most countries in the world, gives goodies to its allies and beats up on its enemies. America is, in fact, so awesome that being anywhere within its sphere of influence causes your country to get infected with the rays of awesomeness that beam out of America’s beating heart, just the way beams of stupid radiate from Michael Medved’s mustache, causing those who gaze too long upon it to start thinking he makes some sort of sense when he writes.
The strongest, most direct evidence against the indictment of the Untied States as a destructive, callous imperial power comes from a consideration of the progress of those nations most closely involved with the United States. In the long-term, the states and peoples who aligned themselves with America in world affairs, and even those nations that experienced lengthy American occupations, prospered economically and developed functioning democratic institutions.
And in the long term, the electrons used in typing a Medved column will be destroyed in the inevitable heat death of the universe, so it doesn’t really matter what his columns say, anyway.
I love the way Medved brushes off the sufferings of those who have to endure those “lengthy American occupations”. And I’m also really puzzled by the blanket assertion that ALL of these countries developed strong economies and democracies. Vietnam is a democratic state? El Salvador has a booming economy? For Pete’s sake, we occupied China for a while!
The phrase “The Yanks are Coming! The Yanks are Coming!” (featured in George M. Cohan’s stirring World War I rabble-rouser “Over There”) most often signaled a nation’s immediate liberation and never meant its long-term destruction or conquest.
I’m glad we’re back to the theme of “history as it appears to me in the movies”, because it’s the one area where Medved looks like something less of an ass than he usually does.
Each national story boasts its own distinctive features but the experience of America’s Western European allies, as well as our one-time enemies in Germany, Italy and Japan, indicates that inclusion in the U.S. sphere of influence helped provide protection, prosperity, and the chance for flourishing democracies.
What it indicates is the cash, cash, cash we were prepared to throw at countries after WWII to make sure they didn’t become Communist satellites or even Communist-friendly. This isn’t even inherently a bad thing, but to pretend that it somehow shows that being under American influence magically leads to democracy is ludicrous. We were in a position to throw money at countries after WWII; our infrastructure was still intact. We used that to our advantage in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. We weren’t in Japan to bring them democracy; we were there to keep them from becoming Communist. Even a cursory survey of MacArthur’s actions during the occupation – his willingness to suppress trade union strikes, for instance – shows this pretty clearly. The whole division of Germany into East and West lies in no small measure in our refusal, post-WWII, to permit the establishment of a German government that was officially neutral on issues of Communism. Stalin would have permitted a unified Germany to exist on his border under those circumstances, and considering the losses his country took at German hands, it doesn’t even seem that unreasonable a request. But America refused, and so Stalin refused to release the territory he’d paid for in blood. In this particular case, it seems as though Germany became unified and prosperous despite our influence, not because of it. But I suppose this is more of that liberal obsession with details instead of destiny that Medved was complaining about earlier.
AMERICAN INTERVENTIONS GENERALLY AMOUNT TO TEMPORARY MISSIONS RATHER THAN PERMANENT CONQUESTS
In 1942, the historian Rupert Emerson declared: “With the exception of the brief period of imperialist activity at the time of the Spanish American war, the American people have shown a deep repugnance to both the conquest of distant lands and the assumption of rule over alien peoples.”
In the 65 eventful years since Emerson’s observation, this “deep repugnance” remains a prominent feature of American public opinion and has helped to shape foreign policy. The bloody (and seemingly innumerable) foreign wars of the Twentieth Century saw millions upon millions of American troops deployed to every corner of the globe but for the most part they came home at the earliest opportunity. President Wilson dispatched more than two-million American soldiers to France to win World War I, but in less than two years they had all left the Old World behind. The sixty year presence of American forces in Europe and Japan following the Second World War has not only decreased dramatically in size since the demise of the Soviet threat but continues today at the insistence of the host countries.
“Continues at the insistence of the host countries”? Sadly, No!
These long-term military assignments represent prominent exceptions to the general American rule of quick, short-term interventions rather than permanent conquests. In 1848, victorious troops marched into Mexico City after the crushing defeat of that nation’s vaunted military machine. “Jingos” at home demanded the annexation of all of Mexico, but instead President Polk accepted a treaty that added to the nation the sparsely populated territory of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah (Texas had achieved its own independence from Mexico eleven years before). Rather than simply imposing its will on a conquered neighbor, the U.S. agreed to assume Mexico’s burdensome national debt of $3.25 million and to pay the government a surprisingly lavish sum of $15 million more. After the settlement, Washington made no attempt to maintain American forces or bases on Mexican soil.
The same pattern applied almost everywhere – with American withdrawal following even the bloodiest, most punishing military struggles. In “Dangerous Nation,” Robert Kagan discerns this same impatience in the Reconstruction of the American South after the War Between the States. In our nation’s first exercise in “Nation Building,” the federal government ultimately failed because it allotted only 11 years before withdrawing Union troops (as part of the compromise that settled the disputed election of 1876) and abandoning the ambitious effort to guarantee justice and security for former slaves. This limited appetite for occupation and rebuilding has bedeviled post-war policies far more than any desire for permanent presence, leading to problematic and truncated missions in conflicts ranging from the Barbary Wars of 1805 to the First Gulf War and the Somali intervention of the 1990’s. Osama bin Laden pointed to America’s humiliation in Somalia (where 18 mutilated soldiers led to a hasty American withdrawal) as one of the incidents that led him to characterize the United States as a “paper tiger” with no staying power. Bin Laden also mentioned the departure from Lebanon in 1983 after the suicide bombing that killed 261 Marines, and particularly noted the way that public impatience and exhaustion brought about the retreat from Vietnam. Ironically, by focusing on the American penchant for quick withdrawals from the world’s hot spots, our primary terrorist adversary undermined his own characterization of the United States as a ruthless imperialist power.
Even the long-standing and often bloody US mission to the Philippines culminated in American decisions to forego any imperial role and resulted in Filipino independence and (flawed) democracy. The United States seized the former Spanish colony with little difficulty at the outset of the Spanish American War, but then suppressed a stubborn nationalist insurrection (1898-1902) that killed more than 4,000 American troops and some 200,000 Filipinos. This nightmare didn’t stop the American authorities from setting up an elected legislative assembly five years later, with a US-style bicameral legislature by 1916. In 1935, the Philippines achieved full internal self-government and, after a brutal Japanese occupation during the War, achieved complete independence (together with massive US reconstruction aid) in 1945. The determination to renounce any colonial role in the Philippines, even after massive sacrifices over the course of nearly a half century, hardly characterizes a typically imperialist approach.
As to the territories added by the United States as part of its ongoing enlargement of its boundaries, none of these acquisitions followed the familiar colonial pattern of invasion and subjugation of hostile native populations. In all cases, American expansion involved annexing or negotiating for sparsely populated tracts of land in which settlers from the U.S. had already established flourishing communities. Before acquiring West Florida from Spain, or Oregon and Washington from Great Britain, or California, Texas and the Southwest from Mexico, U.S. citizens had already rushed into these territories and to some extent Americanized them. More than 30,000 Americans had settled in Texas with the permission of the Spanish colonial and Mexican governments, and by 1835 they outnumbered their Mexican neighbors by at least eight to one. Even the annexation of Hawaii amounted to the confirmation, rather than the beginning, of US domination. American traders and whalers played a prominent role in the islands as early as the 1780’s, and the arrival of US missionaries in the 1820’s led to the rapid spread of Christianity, literacy, and civil institutions. As early as 1854, the native Hawaiian government formally applied to Congress for admission to the Union as an American state – bypassing the normal territorial phase. Because the Hawaiians insisted on joining the Republic as a free state, the slave-holding South blocked their bid for instant statehood. Some thirty years later, Robert Kagan writes, “Hawaii had become a virtual ‘economic colony’ of the United States. Hawaiian products sold to the United States, mostly sugar, constituted 99 percent of all the islands’ exports, while the Untied States supplied three-fourths of all Hawaii’s imports. American-born settlers, the sons and daughters of missionaries and whalers, had over the years become a dominant economic and political force on the islands. Over time the ‘American’ and other influential light-skinned merchants in Hawaii agitated for political rights and a political system more closely attuned to their political and economic interests.” This led to an elected legislature, the decline of the monarchy, the establishment of a republic in 1894, territorial status in 1900, and statehood in 1959. As in the other permanent additions to US territory, it wasn’t invading armies that made Hawaii part of the nation, but independent-minded immigrants and settlers acting for their own advancement, without governmental sponsorship or sanction, and establishing the American communities that made United States acquisition not only possible, but inevitable.
I don’t even know what to make of this. It’s like Medved threw his almanac into a blender with a bottle of tequila and a handful of Thorazine and set it to “frappe”.
PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, has noted that a common creationist debate technique is to throw endless unconnected bits of half-formed misunderstandings of basic science concepts and evolutionary biology mixed together at the evolutionary interlocutor. The sort of misunderstanding that takes a creationist ten seconds to spew, like “if humans came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys?” will take an evolutionary biologist about a half an hour to deconstruct, because of the vast denseness and misunderstanding concentrated into such a small statement. Thus, the creationist can run rhetorical circles around the biologist, because in just two minutes, the creationist can spew out so much ignorance that the poor biologist would have to spend half of his or her life just to start correcting it.
I’d never really thought it was possible to do that with history. Obviously, my imagination has been far too limited until now. In the space of four paragraphs, Medved makes pure, unadulterated hash out of the Mexican-American war, the American annexation of Hawaii, the Texas-Mexican civil war, the American Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Spanish-American war, and I think probably also your mother gets insulted in there as well, but I’m not sure.
I can’t really take that whole thing apart, so I’ll just take a representative piece of that word salad and try to explain what he’s talking about in English, and what it really looked like here on planet Earth.
Hawaii had pretty much been minding its own business when the missionaries started arriving, converting people, and landgrabbing. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, because this is what missionaries have always done. Hawaii was the perfect place to grow sugar cane and tropical fruits, and a small but powerful planter class emerged there. These people weren’t Hawaiians and had no right to the land, but that’s never stopped plantation landgrabbers before.
There was no “native Hawaiian government” appealing for statehood in 1854. This was a government that had endured a taste of British occupation in 1843 and were savvy enough to know what came next. Planters had already forced the government to cede land rights, and the Hawaiians were trying to avoid become part of the British empire. America looked like a friendly harbor. Unfortunately, bringing their governmental weaknesses to the attention of the United States would turn out to be a poor choice for Hawaii’s political independence. The white planters who were occupying Hawaii would soon force a new constitution on Hawaii’s constitutional monarchy that would disenfranchise almost all native Hawaiians, and the government from 1887 on would exist for no purpose other than to promulgate American interests. Native Hawaiians are still in large measure pretty pissed off about this.
If Medved is willing to make excuses for “independent-minded immigrants and settlers acting for their own advancement”, I’m going to have to assume he’s not particularly worried about either the “Reconquista” or the imminence of “Eurabia”, either.
Heaven help me and what’s left of my sanity, but I’m going to go all out and try to finish this in one sitting.
DEMOCRATIC IDEALS, NOT LUST FOR WORLD DOMINANCE, MOTIVATED THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN POWER
The notion of America as liberator of the world animated the Republic and its politics long before the globe-girdling wars of the Twentieth Century. As early as 1838, a Jacksonian newspaper called “The Democratic Review” published a soaring description of America’s destined international role that might bring a blush to the cheek of even the most visionary neo-con:
“The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles: to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High – the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere – its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens – and its congregation the Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling and owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood – of ‘peace and goodwill among men.’”
And the notion of Ike Turner being really, really in love with Tina – so in love with her, in fact, that he had to smack her around sometimes to make sure she didn’t do things to make him stop loving her – animated lots of misogynistic “romance” long before Tina left Ike. But that doesn’t make believing in it any less ridiculous.
Otto von Bismarck might boast of building his German Reich on the basis of “blood and iron,” but the United States consistently viewed its international mission in deeply Christian, messianic terms. After deciding on an ongoing American role in the Philippines, President William McKinley granted a White House interview to the General Missionary Committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church. “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,” the President revealed, “and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way – I don’t how it was but it came… that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!”
I don’t know quite what Medved’s excuse is, but William McKinley was commonly enough regarded as a buffoon for wanting to “Christianize” one of the most Catholic nations on the planet at the time.
One can scoff at such naïveté and sentimentality, just as many Americans scoffed at the soaring rhetoric of the second Bush inaugural with its promise to eliminate tyranny and promote democracy around the world.
Us? Scoff? Never!
Nevertheless, such ideals about the U.S. obligation to less fortunate peoples have always played a role in shaping American policy and mobilizing the public support to permit its implementation. The sincerely held notion of American mission helps to explain the apparent contributions in the U.S. approach to its role in the world: we’re reluctant and embarrassed to pursue raw power for its own sake, but we can be shockingly aggressive, even militant when it comes to promoting democracy, free markets, and Christianity.
I guess it’s never occurred to Medved that a belief can be both sincerely held and wrong at the same time.
Of course, the pursuit of such ideals can also bring financial benefits that enrich the Republic and its populace. In a fascinating new book called “Day of Empire,” Professor Amy Chua of Yale Law School, analyzes the emergences of a succession of “hyper-powers,” each of which dominated the globe in its own era. Concerning the Untied States she writes: “America built its world dominance not through conquest but commerce….America for most of the nineteenth century ‘contented itself with carving out….(an) ‘empire of the seas’- an informal empire based on trade and influence…Even today, as John Steele Gordon writes, “if the world is becoming rapidly Americanized as once it became Romanized, the reason lies not in our weapons, but in the fact that others want what we have and are willing, often eager, to adopt our ways in order to have them too.”
Did you notice how he works this bit in toward the end, when his reader is so exhausted by battling their way through the dense thicket of bullshit he’s been laying down to really appreciate what he’s saying? “Of course, the pursuit of such ideals can also bring financial benefits that enrich the Republic and its populace” – but you shouldn’t assume that this enrichment ever played even the slightest role in any of our foreign policy decisions. America is purehearted and good, as evidenced by our creation of Superman and the Lone Ranger, neither of whom ever did good deeds for money. This could actually be a textbook illustration of Why They Hate Us – it has less, I think, to do with the fact that our foreign policy generally leads to us blowing up lots of powerless people in other countries, and more to do with our constant insistence that the powerless people we’ve blown up are actually better off for us having done so, and really ought to be thankful for it – and that our motives for having done so were complete pure and selfless. It’s the logic of the abusive parent who piously proclaims “this hurts me more than it hurts you”, and it’s deeply pathological.
It also underlies the assumption that “others want what we have and are willing, often eager, to adopt our ways in order to have them too”. Benjamin Barber does a pretty good job of explaining how this completely unsupported assumption feeds into a lot of the anti-American rage around the world, and one of the more troubling modern thinkers out there does an even better job of calling this particular assumption exactly what it is: imperialism.
Just a suggestion, guys: if you want to finally win this war against socialism you’ve been waging for so long, maybe you should stop saying things that make better sense in a socialist narrative of American history than they do in your narrative.
I wish I could stay away from this Medved crap. It’s like a drug: it’s so wrong and so forbidden and just so, so funny when I start that I just can’t help myself. But by the time I’ve done the last line of it, I feel shaky and hollow, and half the day is gone. I know I said I was going to finish this, but I just can’t. I guess it takes time to build up the tolerance necessary to mainline this much pure stupid in one setting, and I’m just not there yet. I think I’ll go lie down for a bit.
For a very long time, I have been amused by the tough rhetoric of the big, strong american Right.
“We must attack Iran and destroy those evil Mullahs”.
“Um, ok. Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious, moonbat? They’re over there in Tehran, calling us NAMES!!
mikey
Heheheh, mikey. That sounds like one of those Tom Tomorrow cartoons.
Is Medved one of those “completed jews” I’ve heard the Xtians go on about? Because he sure has a Jesus jones.
Oh yay, an American-hatin thread!
[dusts off troll zapper]
such ideals about the U.S. obligation to less fortunate peoples have always played a role in shaping American policy and mobilizing the public support to permit its implementation
i.e. it’s alway been easier to sell imperialism to the rubes when it’s wrapped up in frothy, feel-good nonsense.
Are you suggesting that Michael Medved is a retard? Sorry, I meant to say, intellectually challenged?
All those “blunders” (that Medved never gets around to explaining who made) are isolated and long ago, and they shouldn’t detract from big picture considerations.
Know how he feels.
I went to Harvard Law School, but do they call me “Mickey the Lawyer”? No.
Started Kausfiles, but do they call me “Mickey the Blogger”? No.
Started Bloggingheads, but do they call me Mickey the Head-blogger?” No.
But you fuck just one little goat…
Medved, surveying rubble in Iraq: “Do you know how much it would cost them to buy all this depleted uranium?
If Michael Medved read Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Basevich, would his head explode?
Wow. Michael must have been putting all his spare stupid into his idiot bank for a very long time to save up for that.
Shorter Off His MedsVed: They promised us flowers and candies! Where are the flowers and candies?
Jezus. I held my nose and followed the link. Boy was I surprised to see he doesn’t mention the joys of Democracy that cooperation with the US has spread throughout Pakistan.
I love how George Bush and some of his fellow buffoons are the same as the entire country, but never mind. If we take Mr. Medved’s suggestion that close ups are unfair (an idea supported by his photo, yech), we need to get busy re-writing history for the entire world. From the proper perspective, the MedView – where we can see the entire forest and not the bodies hanging from the trees – there are no bad actions because we can’t tell what is going on beyond there’s a forest over there and who could object to a forest?
Of course this means that if a man saw planes flying over Pearl Harbor in the 1940’s and something fell from the planes and later he saw smoke from a fire, he can’t say for certain that one had anything to do with the other and it would be uncouth to enquire, so there’s no point thinking about it and certainly no reason to get angry at the people who sent the planes. Maybe they were dropping flowers and candies. And the same goes for revolutions, invasions, war, internments, displacements, genocide, torture, terrorist attacks and brain-dead pundocrats.
See? Nothing of any importance has ever happened anywhere. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
Who do you say ‘Manifest Destiny’ in Mandarin?
Last night Laura Ingraham, sitting in for Orally and bashing “Redacted”, a movie she’s never seen, suggested that Hollywood should make uplifting movies about the Iraq War “…maybe a remake of, Red Dawn”!!!! You know, the one about the small group of out-numbered and out-gunnedInsurgents fighting the Invaders!!!
Somebody could make a fortune selling these idiots Square Peg Adapter Kits for their Round Hole Observations.
because we obviously don’t need people who teach American history anymore
OK, we’ll just fold it in with warm-ups in gym class. 25 “America is the most awesomest thing evar!!!!!”s between the crunches and the jumping jacks.
but we can be shockingly aggressive, even militant when it comes to promoting democracy, free markets, and Christianity
Free Markets = you have something we want.
And, “shockingly aggressive when it comes to promoting Christianity”? Am I the only one who thinks that’s a bit… I don’t know what… hypocritical? I never really pictured Christ as militant, but I was raised Lutheran so what do I know?
America – beating the Jeebus into Third World nations for over 100 years.
Speaking of creationists, Michael Medved recently became a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.
“’Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,’ said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.”
Intellectual Entrepreneur and Cultural Polymath sound so much better than Professional Bullshit Peddler.
Well, as long as we’re speaking about Germany, Italy, and Japan, we would do well to consider the difference between what was done with those countries compared with what is being done with Iraq. In the case of the defeated Axis powers, we allowed those countries to build upon institutions that were native to those countries before the war. In Germany, the political parties were the native Christian Democratic and Social Democratic parties that existed before the war. Same for Italy with the addition of the Communists. In Japan, we even kept the emperor, for chrissake. Truman recongnized that the continuing stability of these countries depended on our accepting their existing institutions as much as practicable. (Unfortunately for us, Eisenhower brought in the Dulles brothers, who proceeded to set up the foreign policy disasters that we are still paying for even today.)
Contrast this with Iraq, where we brought in an assortment of white-collar criminals, thugs, Iranian lackeys, dimwits, half-wits, and nitwits. It’s as if we asked Hedy Lamarr from Blazing Saddles to form a government, and you know how that ended up. It can be argued that there were no native institutions to build upon, since Saddam fastidiously snuffed any rivals to his power. That’s mostly correct, the best that we could have done would have been to call in the clerics and ask them to put something together. It would most likely have given us an Islamic government, albeit an Arab Islamic goverment and not a government dominated by Iran. As it happened, the Bushies were determined to build a free-market heaven on earth rather than allow the Iraqis to determine their own direction, which is why we’re in the situation that we’re in right now.
f only we\’d demonstrated our generosity to the Taliban afater 9/11. For a Billion dollars or two, I think they\’d have handed over Bin Laden, and perhaps even agreed to let women go outdoors in normal clothes. For another billion democratic elections…I read that Hussein offered to sell us Iraq, cheap. When we refused he offered to give it, if only he could go into retirement. But the generous, beneficent USA had to invade Afghanistan & Iraq and turn them into HellHoles. El Savidorians must be soooo envious!
It’s as if we asked Hedy Lamarr from Blazing Saddles to form a government, and you know how that ended up.
That’s Hedley!
Damn you tigrismus!
It’s as if we asked Hedy Lamarr from Blazing Saddles…
Hedley… it’s… Hedley!
Lili Von Shtupp: Hello, cowboy. Wha’s your name?
Tex: Tex, Ma’am.
Lili Von Shtupp: Texmam? Well, tell me Texmam, are you in show business?
Tex: Well, no, ma’am.
Lilly von Schtupp: Then why don’t you get your fwiggin’ feet off o’ the stage.
My fave.
Is that a ten gallon hat in your lap or are you just happy to see me?
back to the issue at hand. Aw, blow it out your ass, Medved.
My favorite is strangely fitting: “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know … morons.”
I’m not a huge fan of Gavin’s p-shops, but this one is simply horrible. It’s no excuse that he called himself ‘Jillian’ for this post either. Does Gavin think that women don’t know where the head goes on a body? Pretty freakin’ sexist if you ask me, Gavin.
My fave:
Charlie: “Man, they said you was hung!”
Bart: “And they was right!”
Man, that cracks me up. That and the bit with one of the Johnsons as the whole town’s leaving because Hedly Lemar has whipped up a Number Seven.
Bart: “Can’t you see this is the last act of a desperate man?”
Howard Johnson: “We don’t care if it’s the first act of Henry VIII. We’re leaving.”
Mel Brooks never got funnier. And Michael Medved is a goddamn moron. I think it’s because he’s a movie critic. There’s a dude that reviews movies for a music monthly in Atlanta, and though it’s been about two years since I read the damn thing, he was a frothing wingnut who stuck his fingers so far in his ears, he tickled his brain. He also thought Hollywood made movies specifically just to show the Real True Americans that live in Middle America how much it hated ’em. Which is goddamn goofy, but an alarming number of wingnuts do seem to take that as gospel.
Thus, the creationist can run rhetorical circles around the biologist, because in just two minutes, the creationist can spew out so much ignorance that the poor biologist would have to spend half of his or her life just to start correcting it.
Too true. I’m always amazed by the number of false premises and invalid conclusions that can be packed into a simple declarative sentence. Never mind using empirical evidence–it’s not at all easy to combat them with rhetoric, either. Lord knows I’ve tried. If you respond to the creationists’ claim with something simple like “Evolution doesn’t say that humans descended from monkeys,” everybody laughs at you, because of course *everyone* knows that Darwinists think that humans came from monkeys, and what sort of disingenuous liar are you to argue otherwise?
The same sort of thing happens with history. You can compile a Chomskyan review of the facts of a particular historical episode, but these people don’t care: Those are just details (human beings are apparently “just details”), and you need to look at the broader picture, in which America is of course good and great and benevolent and if you don’t believe this you’re some kind of hippie liberal traitor.
I will say, though, that Medved’s article represents some progress, at least compared to the usual right-wing argument. He is at least willing to acknowledge that US intervention had nontrivial ill effects at some point. That by itself is unusual.
Oh, and kudos for using “buncombe.”
Why does the IRS always demand I submit “details” of my earnings and expenses instead of my “destiny”?
Don’t they know how noble and majestic that would be instead.
The fact is, the liberal coastal eleitists in Hollywood and Manhattan with their sophisticaed aires DO hate the middle USA heartland of true beleivers of democracy and freedom, the ones who get their truth from fox news as opposed to the biased.
Here in the heartland, we will always support Bush, and you will always be our enemy. Please stick it up your rear end, libs.
Haha! Medved is a tool!
It’s good to see that Medved, after years to spewing bullshit, has finally gotten what he has pined for all along: easy wingnut welfare and a chance to rub elbows with other political tools. I can imagine the way his mustache danced on his silly grin when he heard the good news. Hell, Medved got what he wanted for doing something stupid! That’s like a reverse meritocracy!
fake Gary.
Blazing Saddles – my first R rated movie.
This line seems appropriate for Medved: What will that asshole think of next.
My favorite line is the same as tigrismus’
Please stick it up your rear end, libs.
Gary, we’re just not that into you.
Dropkick me Medved through the sphincter of life…
About a year and a half ago, when I started hangin around these parts, Gary could, and did, spell impeccably. I’m not certain how many Garys we’ve been through since that time, but they pretty much seem to represent classic devolution….
mikey
I really don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream and such obvious, and odious, hacktacular crap like this. Medved, please read the chapter about the Philipines in “People’s History of the United States” and then get back to us you dirty Motherf*cker. Of course, your so old I’m sure that your Mother is dead, but don’t worry, the maggots and worms will have warmth and movement to simulate life, so hump away on the ugly old broad. You’ll just have to kick Gary Ruppert of the corpse though, because he finally found him a date.
I know that’s mean, and I don’t care. They routinely threaten and bully us, and we just take it. No me and not anymore.
Jackson
One of my all-time favorite quotes – Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry, speaking on America’s Chinese policy to an enthusiastic crowd in Kansas City in 1940: “With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City!”
I once mentioned that line to a group of Chinese students and got some interesting responses.
As for Medved’s history lesson… sheeeit. Guys like him seem to increasingly regard history not as a sequence of real-life events but instead as a useful fiction that can be reshaped at will to suit the rhetorical needs of the moment.
high-on-his-horse and wickedly uninformed, Medved never fails to remind
me of Terry Thomas playing a pretentious upper crust numbskull. That is medved’s voice to a T.
Like most Americans, Medved learned his history from Movies. And even tho Hollywood hates America, they are entirely correct in their depictions of US History. Except for recent films like ‘Redacted’, of course. Filthy Commie Hollywood Scum!
Hey everybody, head over to Tboggs’, we’ve got a live one on the line in the form of Dan Collins. It is quite entertaining and could use a few more voices.
Gary Ruppert wrote:
Wow! Billy the Kid versus Dracula really did happen! I always suspected as much.
Am I gonna have to chase whichever Gary this is away again, like I did last night?
Dude, you have nothing to add except retarded platitudes.
Also, M. Medved has a strong handshake to cover up all the dicks he’s swallowed.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Hey everybody, head over to Tboggs’, we’ve got a live one on the line in the form of Dan Collins. It is quite entertaining and could use a few more voices.
Man, is that not a frightening little meltdown to watch? These guys are all older than me, too, and that just fucking blows my mind. Even if the guy had a point, which he emphatically doesn’t, there comes a time when you just walk away. Some folks are just gonna think you’re a douchebag and that’s how it is. However, screaming like a bloody loon will never, ever convince them of anything otherwise. “Yes, frothing wingnut, you’re unhinged yowling has convinced me of the rightness of your stance, inre: old girlfriends.”
Never happened, never will. But some nights, the wolves are silent and the moon howls, apparently.
I wish Tehran would stop copying S,N! and go back to being Theran.
Eventually, they will all come to truly love Big Brother.
Any time I say I’m tired, my partner will say, “Sick and tired of playing the game?”
His favorite BS line is when Lilly sings, “They’re always coming and going and going and coming . . . and always too soon.” (Or something like that. I may not have the words exactly right, having only seen it about three times. He’s seen the movie about a gazillion times and has the whole thing memorized. On the other hand, I’ve seen Young Frankenstein a gazillion times.)
Re Medved: It’s a fwiggin’ shame.
Stage door johnnies always surround me
They always hound me
With one request
Who can satisfy their lustful habits
I’m not a rabbit
I need some rest
No no no, it was GAY Rupert! I was (blush) being a sockpuppet I guess. I couldn’t resist.
“They’re always coming and going and going and coming . . . and always too soon.”
Timing makes all the difference.
This reminds me of P J O’Rourke’s “Holidays in Hell” – he spends several chapters poking well-deserved fun at the governments of Panama and Poland for their general level of fuckedupiness, and then comes to El Salvador. Details about bodies lying in ditches and civil war – but, you know, it just *happened*. Like the weather. Nobody can understand why, and a simple journalist like him wouldn’t dream of asking.
What are the Western European countries that seem to be doing the best? Off the top of my head, the Netherlands, the Sacandinavian countries and Switzerland. What are the Western European countries least aligned with the US? Um…
And lastly, there was a line cut out of Blazing Saddles. In the scene with Lily and Bart in the dark, the original exchange went like this:
Lily: “Is it Twu what they say about Black men?
[Ziiip]
Lily: “Oooh, it’s Twu, it’s Twu!”
Bart: “I hate to disappint you, ma’am, but you’re rubbing my arm.”
.
“Yes, when you are making an omelette of global wealth and harmony, you might have to break a few national eggs to get there. Okay, maybe twenty or thirty eggs.”
Make that more than fifty military interventions in Latin America alone during the 20th century. The political and economic instability of the region, as well as the proliferation of brutal dictatorships (almost always backed by the US) are a direct result of this interventionism. This is not dwelling on some arcane isolated incident, it is analysis of the main thrust of US foreign policy for over a century and the consequences of that policy. The only thing exceptional about Iraq is the monumental degree of the screw up. And then there is Afghanistan which is quickly self-destructing, such that not even Kabul is safe any more.
Thanks for the tip, stringonastick.
It was fun.
Poor ol’ Dan is in the “last throes” of backing off.
sophisticated aires
Ah. That’s me to a tee. Thanks, Gary.
Seriously, folks, I have just returned from eating some incredible ‘cue.
And a favorite Blazing Saddles line is “A wed wose…..how owdinawy.”
To be fair, I doubt Mikey “off my meds” Medved would be quite so quick to huff on the gubm’t “rod of authority” if those pesky LIEbruhl’s were in charge.
We, the white, god-fearing citizens of
Rock Ridgethe Senate wish to express our extreme displeasure with your choice ofsheriffAttorney General. Please remove him immediately. The fact that you have sent him here just goes to prove that you are the leading asshole in thestatecountry.Thanks for posting this Jillian. What a Juggernaut of Stupid.
Dang. That Tbogg thread is amazing. I saw it this morning with only 10 or so comments.
Dan Collins – who the fuck is he, anyway? – is seriously sick.
Dan Collins, another wingnut who shits on someone, then whines that he’s the victim because whaaaaaaaaa yer all criticising me.
Have I mentioned how much I hate these people? Hate. hate hate hate.
Nah, g, I think after posting some thoughts out there that he just misses her, and loved her (I suspect more than his alleged wife), and is using the wingnuttian tactic of humilating her to get her back into his good graces.
I had no idea who he was, either, until an hour or so ago, but one thing’s for sure: He’s a vicious and bitter dick, at least where this poor woman is concerned.
Yo, Lesley, you did a terrific job out there.
I got the sense he knew he had made a mistake, and is in the beginning of what will likely be a 20 year process of figuring out why. LOL.
Actually, Sn0rghagen, I think “Gay Rupert” wrote that. Yet another Fake Gary or Freudian slip? You decide.
John, his stubborn idiocy is mindblowing isn’t it? Gives you a sense of why the world’s in its current state. Human beings are immensely disappointing creatures.
Lots of them for sure, Lesley. But I’m not so sure about a majority.
Most of us, IMO, want to be able to eat and provide shelter for and be decent to our loved ones. And have as many laughs as we can, and love as many people as we can.
It’s just that The Man doesn’t give a shit.
Michael must have been putting all his spare stupid into his idiot bank for a very long time to save up for that.
Sadly, no… as the wingnuts are determined to keep reminding us, “Stupid” is the most infinitely renewable resource of all. It’s also their first and most impregnable form of defense — a challenged wingnut sprays Stupid like a skunk sprays mercaptan, and with the same general effect on the immediate vicinity.
Perhaps the nascent Progressive majority should adopt the Great Horned Owl as its symbol, since those owls are among the few happy and successful skunk predators.
The same “culture” Medved continually denounces in his movie reviews. And said “soft power” is always backed by military strength, explicit or implicit.
Let’s also notice that the four interventions he mentions were all under the, uh, who was it, um, you know, the Republican controlled Congress at the time was against him & his interventions, oh, right, President Clinton!! Not some dipshit under the influence of neo-cons spreading Free Market Christianity.
Jillian, another tour de force. You’re much stronger than I. Can’t even get through an entire three or four paragraph item from McArdle sometimes.
But just so you don’t get a swelled head, it’s “finagle.” (In the very first paragraph, so very long ago & far away.)
Ann, skunks don’t deserve to be maligned in this way. indeed, the human wingnut is incomparable to any animal, even the lowly but all important dung beetle. they stand on their own contributing naught.
Most of us, IMO, want to be able to eat and provide shelter for and be decent to our loved ones. And have as many laughs as we can, and love as many people as we can.
And, sadly, in order to achieve those goals most of us will go along w/ whatever structure The Man has set up, & screw anyone not counted as a “loved one.”
Not to mention getting our laughs from screwing those others.
I feel bad sharing this but found the info earlier after reading that Medved has joined the Discovery Institute as a fellow to help sell intelligent design piffle and trinkets and Bigfoot sightings to unsuspecting rubes. Sadly, Medved graduated in the 60’s from Yale with an undergrad degree in history. Thus, qualifying him as an expert professional historian, evolutionary biologist & Bigfootologist.
Also, I ‘m pretty sure that I heard Bill O’reilly claim the other day to be a presidential historian before going on to attempt to dispel the “myth” of separation of church (Christian I assume) and state. O’reilly also has an undergrad degree in history fro Marist College. Thus, qualifying him as him an expert professional presidential historian.
Little information … long way … dangerous …, etc.
Now I feel unclean.
You’re right, MBBTC.
Except for the last part, I think. Most of us understand the Golden Rule, as it is fairly obvious to only the worst wingnuts among us.
Nice sentence. Always my alert to go to bed.
It’s obvious to everyone BUT the worst wingnuts among us.
*blush*
Anyway, I still think under pressure, say waterboarding, most humans of any stripe will say, in a Meta way, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
An update to the lo-cal, pie-free Greasemonkey script features an autopsy function.
Sample:
Click on “(kill)” and it becomes
Click on “(autopsy)” and it becomes
I.e., the commenter stays in the kill file, but you can have a peek at the single comment made.
Why? Inevitably, someone will nibble the troll’s bait. A peek at the killed message might help make sense of the ensuing conversation.
Kool feature Fred, thanks!
Holy crap Jillian! What do you think this is, Crooked Timber?
Shorter Medved:
“We had to burn down the forest in oder to save it”
There.
“Critics of the United States and its role in the world prefer to argue their point of view by focusing on specific instances of American bullying or brutality, recounting their favorite horror stories from Indonesia or Nicaragua, Vietnam or Chile, the Philippines or Iraq – or any of two dozen other places around the globe where American intervention or involvement imperfectly exemplified the nation’s self-professed high ideals.”
Right on. Goddamn critics pointing out the two or three dozen examples in recent history where US expansionist foreign policy really kinda fucked things up for everyone. Talk about cherry picking! Hawaii turned out good, so therefore, Imperialism is a good thing! Bwahahaha!
“Yes, it’s possible to argue that the United States (and our British allies) harmed democratic development (and our own long-term interests) by undermining the leftist Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, but that doesn’t justify (or even explain) the current Iranian designation of the U.S. as “The Great Satan””
Exactly! Just like how the Boston Massacre in no way explains or justifies the American Colonies’ rebellious, anti-crown activities, or the cheering crowds at Philadelphia rally’s lustfully chanting “give me liberty or give me death!”
“They lack perspective, and ignore context.”
Right. Everyone knows that, once US troops return home and call, “base!” all is forgiven and the world goes back to the way it was before we, ya know, carpet-napalmed your villages. Hey, it worked in the War of 1812!
“The phrase “The Yanks are Coming! The Yanks are Coming!” (featured in George M. Cohan’s stirring World War I rabble-rouser “Over There”) most often signaled a nation’s immediate liberation and never meant its long-term destruction or conquest.”
A song still song today in the hallowed halls of Monte Cassino. HEY! FUCKER! BACK THE FUCK AWAY FROM WIKIPEDIA! I SEE YOU!
“PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, has noted that a common creationist debate technique is to throw endless unconnected bits of half-formed misunderstandings of basic science concepts and evolutionary biology mixed together at the evolutionary interlocutor.”
Ohh, you’re just pissed because new life isn’t springing out of your jars of Jif, Jillian.
“President William McKinley granted a White House interview to the General Missionary Committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church. “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,” the President revealed, “and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way – I don’t how it was but it came… that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!””
God told hin to do it. Go ahead and try to prove otherwise. Bwahahahaha!
“One can scoff at such naïveté and sentimentality, just as many Americans scoffed at the soaring rhetoric of the second Bush inaugural with its promise to eliminate tyranny and promote democracy around the world.”
See? We have the VISION! It’s not our fault these backwoods retard darkies won’t accept our awesomeness, no matter how much we bomb them.
“but we can be shockingly aggressive, even militant when it comes to promoting democracy, free markets, and Christianity.”
Just ask those Native Americans, and they’ll agree: I’m sold on America!
LOL, now this is a serious fucked up commentary, but very wingnutesque. After all, history can be ugly and certainly doesn’t correspond to the propaganda if you actually look at the detail. This whole idea that looking at detail is bad, certainly is if you’re a wingnut revisionist trying to defend the US. As detailed in Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” even today they point to the glaring successes of Chile under Pinochet, Argentina and Bolivia under their respective military juntas, Russia and Poland as case studies in successful mutually beneficial “free market” American imperialism. And this works as long as you don’t bother yourself with the details.
The Impressionists proved you can make anything pretty as long as you blur all the detail and use lots of pastel. We need more Pre-Raphaelites to see the actual reality. That is, more Howard Zinn, William Blum & Naomi Klein.
By the way, being so opposed to detail, he certainly goes to a lot of trouble of revising an awful lot of detail to satisfy his fuzzy ignorance about American history. But hey, detail is only bad if people who disagree with the contention that the US “awesomest thing evar!!!!!” use it; not the other way around.
Arky: “From the proper perspective, the MedView – where we can see the entire forest and not the bodies hanging from the trees – there are no bad actions because we can’t tell what is going on beyond there’s a forest over there and who could object to a forest?”
Very well put.
Mies van der Rohe said, “God is in the details.” Of course, Medved doesn’t care what some Euroweenie thinks, even if said Euroweenie was a world-famous architect and the only thing Medved has ever built is his reputation as an idiot.
God, don’t EVER make me read such large blocks of unadulterated Medved again! I don’t really have the energy for a full on anti-Medved rant, suffice to say he’s an icky little boot licking imperialist and utterly soulless apologist for the worst atrocities imaginable. Seriously, is this guy capable of empathy or kindness or any sort of positive human emotions at all? If our intentions in the Philippines were so goddamn noble, why didn’t we “give” them independence BEFORE killing 200,000 of them?! I also love his apparent belief that so long as you say you have good intentions, anything you do is totally moral and was obviously done for the good of the wogs.
God, the utter wickedness of the neo-con mindset just staggering. Almost makes me wish I was a drinking man.
“’Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,’ said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.”
There is no greater evidence as to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Creationist movement than that they call Micheal Medved an “intellectual entrepreneur” with “insight judgment and wit”
Well, that and they cannot tell the difference between mythology and science.
I tend to think that is a telling flaw…
mikey
“Medved, please read the chapter about the Philipines in “People’s History of the United States” and then get back to us you dirty Motherf*cker.”
Your reference to hippie commie garbage, combined with bad language, in sures you will not be taken seriously in the heartland or anywhere but France.
“Well, that and they cannot tell the difference between mythology and science.”
Why do you think they love the Stache so much?
What about the heartland of France?
Well, since Gery mentioned it….
http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/maps/density1.jpg
Is the “Heartland” that “big empty patch there in the middle where no one lives so who gives a fuck what they think or which farm animals they’re fucking”?
Cause it would seem to me that “Real” America is on the coasts.
Some Guy,
Well, I live in that big empty patch there in the middle, and I don’t particularly care to know which farm animals my neighbors are fucking. And I read Sadly No a hell of a lot more frequently than I read Michael Medved.
And I bet that Medved happens to live on one of those aforementioned coasts.
Shorter Medved:
“We had to
burn downspray the forest with Agent Orange in order to save it”Fixed.
Bah. Now I feel bad. >
Thanks, Fred!
Gundamhead: Don’t worry about it; drinking doesn’t help. Reading Medved is like pounding nails into the floor with your forehead. The best thing that can be said about that article is that it sets up the whole “trying to Christianize the Philippines” thing.
Which reminds me, Bob Geldof, they (the 40% of Ethiopians who have been Christian a couple of centuries longer than the English) *did* know it was Christmas-time, but their main thing is the Holy Theophany (aka the Epiphany) a couple of weeks after Xmas.
Jillian, I couldn’t make it through the whole Medved column. I still remember when he was just a crappy film critic versus a crappy cultural critic pretending to be a historian and scholar.
The Mouse That Roared affectionately satirizes American generosity, and also arrogance, not naivete!
Medved’s reading fits his entire imperialist message, and reveals what a twisted little prig he is. His cluelessness about Iran is staggering, but he’s just like Bush and Podhoretz, not caring that the Iraqis want us out, angered that they’re not showing enough gratitude.
Medved a polymath? In Bizarroworld!
Medved + DI = [Critical Mass of Stupid] The earth now revolves around a new center.
Once these two powerhouses have combined their strengths no purer source of Teh St00pid will be found on this planet.
[S]uch ideals about the U.S. obligation to less fortunate peoples have always played a role in shaping American policy and mobilizing the public support to permit its implementation
i.e. it’s alway been easier to sell imperialism to the rubes when it’s wrapped up in frothy, feel-good nonsense.
What I used to imagine was the lure of pornography over otherwise strong sensible mens folk .
“Medved a polymath? In Bizarroworld!”
Oh no no no Willy. Medved has seen every movie ever made and then he writes about it!! That alone makes him a cultural polymath in wingnuttia. He has probably also watched more TV than any of us. He is an intellectual force to be reckoned with ah tells ya!
The rumor that the only reason he became a critic is because he just happened to be the one standing around the water cooler when his station needed one is a vicious liberal lie.
Good grief, Collins’ and supporters’ entries to that TBogg thread form one of the biggest displays of pathetic-yet-insane jerkdom I’ve ever seen. Even at its length that thread is a concise overview of the wingnut method of dealing with life. [Shudder]
Oh, and Doctorb Science – I know people probably ask you this all the time, but are you an M.Db or a Ph.Db?
Oops, wrong thread. sorry.
Oops, I was wrong about this being the wrong thread. Sorry.
“Is the “Heartland” that “big empty patch there in the middle where no one lives so who gives a fuck what they think or which farm animals they’re fucking”?
Cause it would seem to me that “Real” America is on the coasts.”
Incorrect. Population density might be lower, but the values and ideals as well as level of hard work and determination and patriotism are much much higher per capita than in the festerning, amoral biased cities full of crime, violence, sodomy and drug abuse.
That’s either the real Gary or a very accomplished faux. Extra points for “festerning.”
‘Nother cuppa coffee, Sam?
Gary Ruppert wrote:
No, Gary, you’re wrong about that. Crime, violence, sodomy and drug abuse involve lots of hard work. If you don’t believe me, just try spending a night stacking up fifty-pound bales of PCP and Jimson weed down at your local Columbian drug cartel warehouse.
Hello? Where is everybody? That was some helluva party at Tbogg’s huh?
Poor, poor Shrieking Harpy is having a worse month than Isiah Thomas. Chuckles threw her under the bus, the lizards are now calling her Atlas Jugs, nobody comments at her site anymore and just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse Teh Moustache lets her down.
Dude, where’s my comment?
Medved’s screed is simply an expanded version of every fifth-grade American History textbook ever approved by any school board. Really guys, don’t you remember the TITLES of those tomes? “America, Land of Freedom” was mine. They were all similarly christened.
The doctrine of American All-Benevolence and Moral Purity is a concept deeply ingrained in the national psyche, starting at a very young age. One is to accept every action made by our government—no matter how bloody, criminal, aggressive, international-law-violating or exploitative—-as part of a grand campaign to Spread Freedom to Those Unfortunate Foreigners Dumb Enough To Have Gotten Born Somewhere Else. And don’t you forget it!
Naturally, this posture goes a long way towards stifling domestic dissent, since anyone who opposes the actions of saintly Uncle Sam, logically, must be in league with Satan.. But as we have seen–especially over the past, oh, four and a half years or so—this doctrine of delusion has led to a mass interpretation of events by a still-gullible segment of our populace which can only be deemed psychotic.
Honest to God—thanks to this kind of America the Good and Pure indoctrination, there are still people who see the invasion of Iraq as a good thing—-despite millions dead and maimed, the desolation and havoc we have wreaked upon that sorry land. After all, it was done for the cause of Freedom and Democracy, you liberal skanks—and let’s not have any traitorous talk about exploitation of resources, attempts to shore up the dollar, or laying the groundwork for indefinite military domination of the region.
Three nore points I forgot to make in my posting fervor:
1) Jillian, however did you get through the entire Medved swamp without downing case of Pepto-Bismol?
2) Someone oughta send Medved “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins, in a plain brown wrapper.
3) It figures that the same people who view “The Flintstones” as a documentary would call Medved an historian. (God, YALE graduated him? Higher ed ain’t what it used to be, I guess.)
A small correction.
Reading Medved is like pounding nails into your forehead with the floor.
When the only tool you have is your forehead, everything looks like a nail.
When you nail everything with your forehead, everything looks like the floor.
When all you have is the floor, everything looks like your forehead?
mikey
Deep…
It’s “rock-solid entertainment…a brontosaurus-sized hit!” (Michael Medved, New York Post).
I am not searching the internetz for Medved’s opinion on Flintstones: Viva Rock Vegas aka, the least anticipated sequel of all time. I do not want to know.
“It’s “rock-solid entertainment…a brontosaurus-sized hit!” (Michael Medved, New York Post).”
That’s an actual quote!? He makes Pantload sound like a latter day Oscar Wilde by comparison. Frankly the fact that anyone takes Medved seriously on any subject is an embarrassment.
He’ll fit right in at the D.I.
Why is it that when someone mentions crime, sodomy and drug abuse I think “GOP”?
Why is it that when someone mentions crime, sodomy and drug abuse I think “GOP”?
You’re lucky, Arky. I start writing letters of apology…
mikey
Since when did it become OK to have no Sunday updates at Sadly, No? It’s not like you fuckers are in church or something.
SamFromUtah, I’m a PhDb (the “b” stands for “byobb”).
“Johnny Coelacanth said,
Since when did it become OK to have no Sunday updates at Sadly, No? It’s not like you fuckers are in church or something.”
Well, to be fair, judging from his lack of posts, I assume they haven’t yet caught Cheetos-crazed Gavin yet, so that’s gunna eat up a lot of time.
Q: What do you call a wingnut movie critic with a feeble (at best) grasp of the facts?
A: A polymath
(My dictionary has a different definition, but what does a nerd like Webster know?)
The fact is, a year from now, I will be laughing laughing laughing as yet another scumbag liberal presidential hopeful is taken down and Republicans with moral values once again carry the day. At that point the coastal eleitists should just give up and stop warring with The Heartland, where I am, because the soul and spirit of USA is here. I look forward to the outlawing of media bias so that the market decides, not subsidized by Soros and PBS and my taxes, and the points of view will be balanced.
Stop The Bias!
Get the facts here:
http://www.foxnews.com
http://www.mrc.org
Fake Gary, or Stupid Gary?
It’s so hard to tell.
You missed a couple of points in the Iran time line, namely: US supports Iraq in iran iraq war, and US shoots down passenger plane with sea to air missile, refuses to pay damages: death to America!
Does anyone else visualise this Gary as laughing laughing laughing in an underground lair? Complete with white persian cat, giant wall screens displaying the progress of his machiavellian schemes, a piranha tank, a hothouse full of giant mutant Venus fly-traps, and a trophy room where he keeps mementos of his victories over the forces of Soros?
TBogg’s “Thread of Doom” has now reached 1065 comments, strike that, it’s now 1095 and still going. Fake Gary sucks.
Herr Doktor: Persian cats are fluffy and pretty.
Dr. Evil-style cats, on the other hand, are hairless and silly-looking.
Patkin said,
November 19, 2007 at 1:04
Fake Gary, or Stupid Gary?
It’s so hard to tell.
Tis all the same. Viva La Difference!
No, I visualise Gary laughing laughing laughing in a cramped bedroom festooned with posters of heavy metal bands and with dirty underwear draped over the lampshades. Giggling maniacally to himself until his mum knocks on the door to ask if he’s doing “that thing” again.
Gary, here’s one for you, with all your heartlandy godbothering ways:
“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion…
Three sets of findings stand out: the associations between religion – especially absolute belief – and juvenile mortality, venereal disease and adolescent abortion. Paul’s graphs show far higher rates of death among the under-5s in Portugal, the US and Ireland and put the US – the most religious country in his survey – in a league of its own for gonorrhea and syphilis.
And vis a vis Medved, it looks as though he’s attempting to justify his own self-congratulatory masturbation by reference to other folks’ self-congratulatory masturbation. I mean, surely his history professors would have suggested that what people say isn’t always what’s true. Wouldn’t they?
As for this paragraph, it almost tempted me to rob a bank so’s I could get plane fare to fly over and nut the stupid bugger:
The United States … then suppressed a stubborn nationalist insurrection (1898-1902) that killed more than 4,000 American troops and some 200,000 Filipinos. This nightmare didn’t stop the American authorities from setting up an elected legislative assembly five years later, with a US-style bicameral legislature by 1916. … The determination to renounce any colonial role in the Philippines, even after massive sacrifices over the course of nearly a half century, hardly characterizes a typically imperialist approach.
“This nightmare”?!? I just know that the miserable bastard isn’t referring to the hundreds of thousands of innocent Filipinos dead, but to the death of 4,000 invading soldiers ruthlessly destroying an attempt at self-rule. And the war in the Philippines was extremely brutal, from the US side at least. Atrocities were common, and commonly justified.
And those “massive sacrifices”? Well, don’t get me started.
And clearly Medved hasn’t heard about the more than 700 US bases around the world (and note that that article was published in 2004, so is likely out of date) where more than a quarter of a million US soldiers live like kings.
Indeed, so far above the local citzenry do the US troops stationed overseas consider themselves, that it provokes serious protests, like this one in Korea after two schoolgirls were killed by a tank, and the numerous rapes and rape/murders that happen in Okinawa. “Continues at the insistence of the host countries”, my lily-white arse.
Yes, but the original Ernst Stavro Blofeld did indeed have a Persian. And Blofeld is Gary Ruppert’s role model.
Gimme post.
Major, would you settle for some fresh eggs?
Give everybody post!
I am not a sock puppet!
I’m sorry Major, sir, but there is a small formality requiring the signing a few loyalty oaths before you can be served…
No post.
But everybody gets a share…
mikey
Christ, there’s like forty eleven people who post on this blog, and they’re ALL hung over? In their jammies watching football and drinking microbrews?
Gad. It got so bad I actually put up a new piece at my shitty little blog.
I’m gonna go fuck around with a new marinade….
mikey
Oh my god!
Some international inspectors just showed up at my door.
They wanted me to turn over documents related to my mashed potato program related activities.
I’m going to the UN…
mikey
weapons of mashed destruction…
Hey, I’m not hung over or in my jammies.
But I am about to go off for my afternoon nap. I am a cat, after all. There are rules.
weapons of mashed destruction…
Ha!
OK, I’m awake now.
When all you have is a masher, everything looks like a potato…
There comes a time in every cat’s life when he or she must ponder the significance of his or her existence. Sure, the sun was created to shine through the drapes onto your belly, and mattress pad was made for your claws,but what is your purpose?
Also:
This isn’t ‘Nam, Smokey.
There were rules in ‘Nam?
Why didn’t anybody tell me about them?
mikey
I’m not hung over. I am in my bathrobe, & have no intention of dressing today.
I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N!
Wow, that was awsome. If you scroll way to the right, you can see the background. It’s a blue-and-white verson of that stamped metal that’s on construction equipment.
I think they are interested in the vodka distillery you got going in the back. ‘Cause I assume that’s where all the “extra” potatoes are going.
Ow! Damnit! That was not a potato. It was my nose.
[Staunches bleeding].
Easy mistake to make. Could happen to anyone.
will this work?
Did it?
No. 🙁
I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N! I’m breaking S,N!
How’d he do that? [looks at page source]. Oh, I see. Non-breaking space characters.
In the comment, I mean, though the current commentariat are also space characters of one form or another.
Sadly, that’s the only debauchery I can come up with. I tried imbedding stuff, and doing the usually, “on-load, redirect to goatse.cx” thing, but it seems WP keeps commenters jailed pretty well.
If you scroll way to the right, you can see the background.
And then I could see the individual pixels…
Then I was zooming in on the individual electrons, seen through a mesh of HTML code…
Then there was nothing but the White Light everywhere…
I suspect that Doktorling Sonja has been borrowing my coffee grinder to munge up morning-glory seeds again.
That makes for strange days at the office, let me tell you.
I know why Gavin, at least, hasn’t posted, but it’d be incredibly dickish of me to say why.
Good reason, tho.
I’m betting that most of the S,N! writing staff is watching the Patriots utterly humiliate yet another team. Once the game is over we’ll all be treated to that Tom Brady flash movie.
oh, go ahead brad don’t let feeling dickish stop you. it didn’t me.
me either.
Dickesh?
That’s fucked up.
But it’s not necessarily dickish.
Dickish is is fairly harsh. What do I know from dickish?
Fuck you. Fuck dickish.
just sayin…
mikey
Nope. Gavin will tell y’all soon enuff. I only know cause facebook has an odd quirk in one regard.
Dickesh? D’Souza, you mean?
Mikey, check it out…
Dielectric Properties of Mashed Potatoes Relevant to Microwave and Radio-frequency Pasteurization and Sterilization Processes
Yawn…
at the risk of unsightly self-promotion, my little corner of the internet is occasionally funny, and completely free of inappropriate disclosures of personal matters of folks who i dated in the 80’s. (and this is not just because i didn’t date anyone in the 80’s.)
if you get tired of trying to break the s,n!, feel free to drop on by.
/unsightly self-promotion.
Medved lives — or, at least, he used to, anyway — on Mercer Island, one of the toniest suburbs of Seattle. When he moved here, the Seattle Times (51% of which is owned by Frank Blethen, also a resident of Mercer Island) printed a fawning puff-piece about Medved’s civility, knowledge, etc. Medved had moved here to take a job in local hate-talk radio (he couldn’t find employment equal to his talents in L.A.) and immediately began flinging his poo at us liberals. He constantly attacked everything about Seattle, sinking his rotted teeth into our civic hand until they snapped. (I listened to the hate station because the GOP controlled the Washington State legislature in the mid-90’s, and they got their every bad idea from hosts like Medved.)
That this vile, wingnut-wlefare case has now decided to join the creationists comes as no surprise. Just be glad he’s sucking up two wingnut-welfare positions, thus preventing a local Megan McArdle from starting here. (We already had one, decades ago; his name was John Carlson, and he’s a radio host. But you knew that.)
“Does anyone else visualise this Gary as laughing laughing laughing in an underground lair? Complete with white persian cat, giant wall screens displaying the progress of his machiavellian schemes, a piranha tank, a hothouse full of giant mutant Venus fly-traps, and a trophy room where he keeps mementos of his victories over the forces of Soros?”
No….but I can picture him dressed up as Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz.”
Lib’ruls and Muslims and Gays, Oh my!
Medved is the leading insane-ocrat. I use him as a weathervane. How hard *does* the far right suck and blow at the same time? Read Medved.
The fact is, I just watched the vile class warfare propoganda piece known as Sicko. Michale Moore is the Sicko here, in his apoologia for socialism and hatred for American capitalism and ingenuity. This film should never have been released here and deserves zero media attention, but the liberal media does tilt the way of biased. We have the best medical in the world, which is why we don’t give it away like those other countries, and they have high taxes and don’t allw you freedom to choose, liberals shold stop whining and get better or get insurance or just pay for it you have a choice, so do we as a society, if you can’t a fford a life saving treament why are we obligicated to give it to you and have you sponging off the welfare system for years to come? People who are that sick and poor should just give up.
Hahahaha Gary, I get it. But you don’t have to try so hard to make conservatives look moronic—-they do a fine enough job by themselves.
Sooooo. No new post until this thread hits 1126, Gavin & Co.?
Yes, but the original Ernst Stavro Blofeld did indeed have a Persian. And Blofeld is Gary Ruppert’s role model.
Oh.
Huh. Spent a whole day unplugged from SN and missed . . . not a whole lot, actually. No offense intended to the millionaire lebowski’s experimentation.
Just to discuss the Mexican-American War a little bit. Meved says,
“Jingos” at home demanded the annexation of all of Mexico, but instead President Polk accepted a treaty that added to the nation the sparsely populated territory of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah…
Sadly, no. Most Americans feared absorbing a lot of Catholics into the American population and very few Americans favored occupying all of Mexico. The war was specifically fought to steal California from Mexico to fulfill Polk’s dream of an America that ran from sea to shining sea. The southwest was needed so that a connection between Missouri and California could be secured. When Polk sent his army down the Santa Fe trail, he had no desire to occupy Mexico. His specific aim was to seize New Mexico and Arizona, defeating any Mexican resistance and then moving on to California. I’m not sure how Medved defines sparsely populated but there were, in fact, several hundred thousand Native Americans living in California and the southwest at the time. Of course, those people don’t count in Medved-world.
Here’s something I don’t know much about. Note that the link leads to a motherfucking PDF.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/2b/48/ad.pdf
This article will explore the topic of
the unconstitutional deportation of Mexican
Americans (American born citizens)
during the 1930s and advocate for its
inclusion in elementary and secondary
social studies curricula, especially through
the use of family history and oral history.
Actual quotes from oral history interviews
conducted by the author and others are included
here. This deportation is estimated
to have involved 1-2 million people across
the United States, with the majority of
individuals involved being American born.
“or any of two dozen other places around the globe where American intervention or involvement imperfectly exemplified the nation’s self-professed high ideals.”
I give you imperfect involvement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_Crater_Massacre
But it was done with the purest of intentions…
p.s. Thank you Mr Twain
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comments_on_the_Moro_Massacre
Medved can’t even provide the complete context of The Mouse That Roared because it dilutes his argument.
Yes – imminent financial collapse because a US winemaker killed their export market with a cheap knock-off brand.
Satire is hard.
The fact is,…. apoologia for socialism and hatred for American capitalism and ingenuity. This film should never have been released here and deserves zero media attention, but the liberal media does tilt the way of biased. We have the best medical in the world, which is why we don’t give it away like those other countries, and they have high taxes and don’t allw you freedom to choose, liberals shold stop whining and get better or get insurance or just pay for it you have a choice, so do we as a society, if you can’t a fford a life saving treament why are we obligicated to give it to you and have you sponging off the welfare system for years to come? People who are that sick and poor should just give up.
Now this is just a paragraph full of fun. Apoologia? Tilt the way of biased? Obligicated? The best medical? Medical what?
And especially the ‘fford.’ Gary, we’re gonna tell the Illuminati that you’re failing because you can’t spell.
As long as we’re talking about people sponging off of society, Gary, how much leeway should we give the illiterate?
Sorry about the hanging tag. I’m only html-illiterate.
the liberal media does tilt the way of biased
Someone Swanked in Gary’s coffee.
Y’know, I believe in learning something new every day.
And today I have learned something new.
I have learned we have the best medical in the world.
I’ve also learned that one of the most direct paths to incoherence is simply to use an adjective as if it was a noun.
I still say that original Gary could spell, and this Gary is some kind of Hungarian knock-off…
mikey
Poor Gary. Pining for the ffords
today I have learned
somethingnew.Fixed.
Today’s lesson in “Writing Good the Ruppert Way” was brought to you by Bimler Research Laboratories.
See how well Medved’s “thesis” fits with Shelby Steele’s “thesis”? – All this bullshit about the great, gentle Amurrican Giant (Paul Bunyan, with his great loyal blue ox McDonnell-Douglas Halliburton) who forbears from using his great size and strength…Not a Godzilla – rather, a big benign retarded Forrest Gump, to whom things merely happen…Or, better yet – Mice and Men’s Lenny, the loving stroking happy goof who’ll smush the object of his affections with his sausage-like finger…Anyway – Medved and Steele are trafficking in this alternate reality, this theodicy, in which good intentions override the plain trudging-along of historical events – these wingnuts are the anti-Voltaires…
Didn’t even get very far into Medved’s latest tripe before I stumbled over his lack of film knowledge…and he’s a film reviewer? The Duchess was the great Margaret Rutherford, not Peter Sellars. What an idiot in every way possible. Ugh. Can’t read anymore.
Medved was anticipated and refuted by Mark Twain long ago in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” What causes despair is that despite Twain’s great work, the gibberish of a Medved can still flourish, more than a century later.
You liberals are a bunch of weak fags. Leave it to you flock of pussies to oppose every anti-terrorism measure by the Bush administration. You treasonous pigs would rather lose the war on terror then support support our President in this struggle of our times! YOUR PATHETIC! YOU PEOPLE MAKE ME SICK WITH YOUR MISGUIDED SENSE OF COMPASSION TOWARDS TERRORISTS AND CRIMINALS WHILE YOU COULDN’T CARE LESS ABOUT THE 3000 INNOCENTS THOSE DOGS MURDERED ON 9/11! Go back to smoking pot and leave the politics to real men YOU FAGGOTS!
Umm. That would be REAL MEN named Booger, by the way.
Oh, and Booger boy?
It’s You’re pathetic. You know, contraction of “You Are”?
Your pathetic is an incomplete sentence. Such as “Your pathetic little penis has this weird orange dust on it”.
Got it? Good…
mikey
Mr. Booger seems to be one of those ‘Internet Tuff Guys’ you described so memorably a while ago, Mikey.
humbert, Margaret Rutherford was the Duchess in the sequel, “The Mouse on the Moon”, which didn’t feature Sellers in any role. Sellers played the Duchess, the Prime Minister, and Tully Bascombe in “The Mouse That Roared”.
Medved is still a prat.
Hee hee.
Mister Booger.
Tha’s funny…
mikey
medved is such a idiot….he isnt even worth a few bytes in cyber space
Concern grows for the missing Gavin.
Arthur Machen described the side-effects of abusing certain substances in ‘The Novel of the Orange Powder’:
“I looked, and a pang of horror seized my heart as with a white-hot iron. There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something moved and lifted up what might have been an arm. The doctor took a step forward, raised the iron bar and struck at the burning points; he drove in the weapon, and struck again and again in a fury of loathing.”
Michale Moore is the Sicko here, in his apoologia for socialism and hatred for American capitalism and ingenuity.
[sniffs] Smells like horseshit…. There must be a pony here somewhere….Wonder if it’s an “Apoologia?”
Quickest way to shut up the likes of Booger is to ask him when the attack on Saudi Arabia will be launched.
the Colt 45 automatic (still the most stolen weapon in the US military) was invented in 1905 to drop Huk resistance fighters. Wrapped in leather, they tended to shrug off 38 slugs and descend on US lines swinging machetes.
In 91, in the great Mabini round-up by mayor Lim, (once again mayor, aged 84) I heard that heavy sound, and dived under the bar-room table.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ALLIGNMENT
Did you mean to yell: ALIGNMENT
[…] know I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with Michael Medved lately. I’ve been hard pressed to figure out what’s […]
[…] Michael Medved is a crazy […]
Michael “Don’t know shit” MedVed is one of the biggest propagandist talk radio has. I listen to the show from time to time, and have to cut if off. He will always have clueless people tuning in. because if his listeners were informed and well researched, they would see through his bullshit.