!Kung Foo’

Obama — the gods must be crazy
By Michael Bresciani

In 1980 Mimosa Films released a film comedy starring a Kalahari bushman named only N!Xau, don’t ask for the pronunciation, who not only bears a remarkable physical likeness to Barack Obama but the plot of the award winning film has several similarities to the life of the President.

Bears a remarkable physical wha? Similarities to the hmm? Don’t look now, but we seem to have entered a teaching moment. While Reverend Bresciani’s bio claims that his “articles on many important subjects are now read in every corner of the globe,” the cubic, square antiprismic, or otherwise polyhedral globe that he’s using doesn’t seem to have many black people on it, at least in the areas where three or more planes meet.

In mind of teaching, we have prepared a quiz.

QUESTION:

A black man is trying to gain entry to the White House. When questioned, he claims that the house belongs to him. Can you pick this particular black man out of a lineup of black men?

The controversy about the yet unseen doctor signed long form of Barack Obama’s birth certificate takes on a more stimulating aspect when set side by side with the list of other documents that are also unseen by attorneys general, election commissioners and the…

The answer is #6. The black man trying to gain entry to the White House is Alan Keyes.

 

Chuck Norris Mugs Reality

Fresh off his roundhouse kick to the face of the anti-birthers, Chuck Norris serves up some ‘facts’ (and wouldn’t he just) about health care reform:

Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare

While watching these political hot August nights, I decided to research the reasons so many are opposed to Obamacare to separate the facts from the fantasy. What I discovered is that there are indeed dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page health care bill.

If it was David Vitter’s copy you were reading, the diaper coupons you found tucked away in the document weren’t really part of the bill, Chuck.

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government’s coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development.

OMFG … I can see it now:

 

Ms. Venation To The White Courtesy Phone? Ms. Bertha Venation?

Jammie Wearing Fool:
Dingell: Protesters Remind Me of Robert Byrd

  • Our angry mobs are like the KKK? Way to lower the discourse, Herr Dingellhitler.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


 

A Liberal Weighs In

Michael Lind, Salon.com:
Are liberals seceding from sanity?

  • I have noticed some people acting insane lately, and the first on my list is Kevin Drum.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™


 

Everything that’s wrong with modern journalism

Marc Ambinder, come on down:

The field of cognitive neuroscience has all but given up trying to distinguish between emotion and reason, but political debate evidently lags far behind the science. Some observers of health care politics, particularly on the left, tend to accuse their opponents of trying to trigger emotional panic points rather than argue dispassionately about the facts. The implication is that the Right doesn’t have any facts, so it looks to exploit voters’ fears. There is something to be said for this argument, but it’s not what proponents would have you believe. In policy debates where the target voter claims an independent identity, the side that’s proposing something usually has a set of normative facts, and the side that’s against something always appeals to that which most powerfully undercuts a fact. Democrats and Republicans both use emotion, but they use it differently, and use it to achieve different goals.

The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too — albeit a wholly different emotion — the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate.

Sigh.

You know? I…

Sigh.

Sigh.

Encouraging people to “rationally deliberate something and meaningfully contribute to an important public debate” is not an emotional appeal. Indeed, the words “rational” and “deliberate” tend to be more toward the opposite of the word “emotional.”

You know what is an appeal to emotion? Yelling that Barack Hussein Obama is going to strangle your grandmother and then laugh as he throws her in a dumpster. See, that’s an appeal to emotion.

Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

 

The paranoid style

Hoo boy:

Town Haller Envisions Future With Toilet Paper Rationing

By Rachel Slajda – August 11, 2009, 11:53AM

A town hall attendee who told Sen. Arlen Specer (D-PA) that she doesn’t want to see America turn into Russia appeared on Fox News after the event and offered her chilling view of the country’s future:

I know that years down the road, I don’t want my children coming to me and asking me, ‘Mom, why didn’t you do anything? Why do we have to wait in line for, I don’t know, toilet paper or anything?’ I don’t want to have to tell them I didn’t do anything. As a normal citizen, the most I feel like I can do is come to this town hall meeting.

“The country is slowly being ripped apart,” said Katy Abram, who identified herself as someone who didn’t care about politics until the last few years. “It scares the life out of me.”

Abram was one of 30 people selected to ask a question to Specter. When she got up, she said, in part, “It’s not about health care … It’s about the systematic dismantling of this country … I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country. I want to restore this country to what it was under the Constitution.”

Sigh.

For the life of my, I don’t know where this stuff comes from.

Bob Somerby, as is his wont, would accuse me of being a Bad Liberal for being surprised at any of this. Indeed, he’d point me to the famous Hofstadter essay about the paranoid style of American politics and say, “REEEEEAD, DUMMY!”

But the thing is, I have read it. And while Hofstadter goes into a lot of the history of paranoia in American politics, from anti-Mason movements up through McCarthy and the Birchers, he doesn’t give a satisfactory answer as to the why. Indeed, even in the section called “Why They Feel Dispossessed,” Hofstadter merely describes the modern right-wing belief that elites within the government are actively betraying the country and paving the way for global Communism, but he doesn’t explain what makes this belief so prevalent and so powerful.

I’ll put it to you like this: when I read about center-right leaders in other countries — think David Cameron, Sarkozy, and Angela Merkel — I see a bunch of pro-corporate technocrats who, while certainly advancing policies that benefit the moneyed classes, aren’t this flat-out insane.

So I put the question to you, dear readers: why do paranoid right-wing belief systems flourish in this country more than others? I might be wrong, but I think we could be the only country in the world where a significant minority of people hold angry protests demanding that the government not provide health care to people. It’s weird.

UPDATE: In the comments, a reader mentions Berlusconi. Fair enough, that’s about the closest example I can think of in modern times. As for Thatcher? Yeah, you’re right to an extent, although Thatcherism is largely out of fashion in Britain nowadays. I mean, you can say you respect Thatcher and all, but the country as a whole isn’t pining for a return of Thatcherism.

 

A Limited Time Offer

FEDERAL ARREST OF TREASONER OBAMA IS CREDIBLY REPORTED TO OCCUR IN 60 TO 90 DAYS!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

All this time, we’ve been letting the days drop from our Far Side desk calendar and the weeks fly away on their little stylized wings, and even the calendar page of a month come spinning toward the camera, as we sat here covered in cobwebs watching a snail traversing the wall, with an aged paperboy at the door demanding payment in Buffalo nickels and with such gray-and-white wireless kinescope programming on the videogramaphone as DuPont Chemical Presents Little ‘Lectrical Lyceum Featuring Ned Waring — which is back from the old days when you could have picture and sound on your Bendix set, but not both at once, and had to flip the switch to ‘auditory’ when ol’ Waring came on with his orchestra.

Or about 30 seconds beforehand if you were really sharp, because then the 6SJ7 tube would heat up really good and Waring’s Three-Clarinet Threat would roar like ‘t’-total Topsy right out of the streetcar shed. Whoah, I’m telling ya, if you weren’t one of the boys on the base ball squad or glee club, having a feisty flip finger was the ticket to a gandy dance in Popeye pants, and if you weren’t traveling Pullman, you were walkin’, my little company man. I’m talking girdles, which is what we called girls back then before feminism.

Later on, when the automatic switchers came on the sets, you had to be a pair-of-Colts hand on the uke-a-lope, or the Hawaiian banjo, and that was a whole different hau`oli makahiki hou.

No, but if it was a dull night with Waring, some people would flip back to the ‘see’ setting, and that’s how you had the scandal about the giant hooch bottle on the bandstand, after some triple-‘a’ abstainer got bored listening to “Minnetonka Hut-Hut-Hike,” and flipped back to the 6SL7 tube to see Jack ‘Hooch’ Meeber’s bass fiddle case standing up in front of the stage. It’s how you got the rumors that a Negro would come out and replace the lead trumpeter, or that the accordionist would sit down and have a smoke while a fat man with a long beard came out smiling for the solo of “Who Put the Schnitzelbonk in Father Murphy’s Cassock,” wiggling his eyebrows up and down as he squeezed the ol’ steam radiator like some character from the downtown theatre, like the Schmatte Merchant in So Skulnik Becomes a Bridegroom, Already, or Shlemiel in Schlemiel and Schlemazl Become Bridegrooms.

And finally what you heard was that the whole stage would rotate and Waring’s boys would glide off-camera already uncorking their flasks and dealing cards while an ensemble of deepest complexion called Cole Ringer and his High-Stepping Dixie Masons slid into place, counting off numbers like “Apple Dumpling Memories” and “Bim Bam Binky” and performing them with that unusual ferocity for which Waring’s boys were known, while making amused faces in a disrespectful manner. There was a Negro rock music group in the 1970s that depicted this on one of their album covers. High Stepping by Nat Turner Overdrive.

But yes, the flipping-back is also why you always had some fellow at school swearing that ladies would sometimes walk around in swimming suits, only you had to catch it on that certain exact night. Oh I’m telling you, Gus, whatever night you tried it, that wasn’t the one!

Um, what was I…? Oh, all this time, we’ve been laconically flipping cards into a hat as the tired plank of the cuckoo clock hung out presenting the dead mechanical cuckoo bird with its legs in the air and its pink felt tongue hanging out of its upside-down beak, with ‘X’es for eyes no less, lolly-dallying and shillygagging, singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day — in short, behaving casually in regard to the passing of time — when little did we suspect

JAG HUNTER here:

Um, that’s the wingnut with the Military.com site award who criticizes the Judge Advocate General’s Corps while sounding like he’s searching for a British luxury car in which to have an extended drinking bout. And/or just plain suggests masturbation.

Reports have been coming in for several days that the IMPOSTOR OBAMA will be placed under federal arrest in anywhere from 60 to 90 days for TREASON!

That was like 40 days ago! With only 20 to 50 days to go!

WELL DONE to AMERICA’S GRAND JURIES!

The narcissistic grandiosity of the wingnut: If you get a few of your friends together, you can arbitrarily decide that you are a grand jury under the full authority of the Constitution, and you can take your anger out on people by legally indicting them for capital crimes — which you will then (somehow, it never fails) find yourselves legally empowered to prosecute as a prosecutor, produce a verdict for as a jury, and also sentence as a judge and then punish using weapons guaranteed you as a private citizen under the Second Amendment.

It never occurs to you, nor does it even make sense to you, that if you were able to sit down with a few people in your den, on the old couch that was rotated out of the living room and the mismatched beige folding chairs from the garage, with or without soft drinks and Chex Party Mix, and declare yourself literally and without irony to be the federal government, then other people would also be able to sit down in their dens and do this to you.

“That’s different!” the wingnut thinks, not understanding that everyone else also thinks that. “Why, that’s just moral relativism,” the wingnut argues, actually meaning ‘universalism,’ which is the precise opposite and the idea that he really despises.

A secret of the wingnut mind is that ‘relativism’ means the false and insulting notion that the pretend people that we encounter in dreams and in works of fiction are equal to ourselves. “You can’t just become the federal government,” the wingnut hears. “What if Screech from Saved By the Bell or Spongebob’s friend Patrick just arbitrarily decided they were the federal government? Would you accept their authority?” “Pff, as if,” he thinks, also meaning so-called ‘real’ citizens and groups that fail the test of reality by neither obeying his commands the way his hands, dog, and sometimes children do, or terrifying him into obeisance the way his boss, wife, and sometimes penis does.

OBAMA’S is to be the first of tens if not hundreds of arrests of OBAMA’S TREASONOUS CRIMINAL ASSISTANTS!

By the new federal government. Because oh, as we’ve seen, the prior so-called Department of Justice was labeling conservatives as ‘right-wing extremists’ and preparing to put them in concentration camps:

OBAMA’s military preparations for OBAMA’S planned deployment of troops into American communities to exercise martial law have been carried out in plain view for months.

The term ‘plain view’ is another of those things that turned treasonous, forcing wingnuts to tense up and grunt and be that thing so that its reality is more in line with actual reality. It now refers to things plainly seen to exist except in the out-there-place with the so-called ‘world’ and the prove-it people who can’t see anything except their own little objective universe.

Details emerging suggest that military commanders are refusing to obey OBAMA’s orders recognizing OBAMA as a TREASONOUS foreign born domestic enemy.

K.P. details, sure, but that’s just the beginning. Before you know it, the very officers ordering them to peel toilets and scrub potatoes with a toothbrush will be like, “Wait a minute, why is Obama issuing orders recognizing Obama as a treasonous foreign-born domestic enemy? It must be some kind of reverse psychology…”

HERE ENDTH THE LESSON!

We waitth with batedth breadth.

Well done to Netty Wisbaum & Mack Ellis!

We’ll have ours rarer, thanks.

 

Unfunny People

Let’s say you’re Ross Douthat and you’ve been hired by the New York Times to be a sort of conservative ambassador into the Times’ liberal audience. Twice a week you have 750 or so words to make your case why liberals are wrong about all sorts of stuff, from economics to social issues to foreign policy. But instead of writing a cogent, persuasive essay you write something like this:

The Unfunny Truth

It’s been a melancholy summer for social conservatives. Their movement is fighting a rearguard battle in Barack Obama’s Washington. A cluster of family-values politicians — some of whom bunked down in the same Christian-sponsored D.C. townhouse — have spent the last few months confessing to extramarital affairs. And Sarah Palin … well, you know how that’s turned out so far.

Worst of all, nobody likes Judd Apatow’s new movie.

Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

I can only imagine the Times’ copy editors reading this while slowly shredding their own faces off with cheese graters.

“We’re paying him how much to write this shit?” they ask.

So yes, the New York Times is now paying top dollar for third-rate Konservetkult nonsense. And this piece of Konservetkultism is particularly bad because it defeats itself mere paragraphs later. Check it:

Both “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” were designed to hit this worldview’s sweet spot. There were threads of darkness in both stories, but for the most part they made their moralism look appealing by making it look relatively easy.

Still a virgin in middle age? Not to worry — you’ll find a caring, foxy woman who’s been waiting her whole life for an awkward, idealistic guy like you. Pregnant from a drunken one-night stand? Good news — the oaf who knocked you up will turn out to be a decent guy, and you’ll be able to keep the baby and your career as a rising entertainment-news anchorwoman. Frittering away your life on porn and pot? Fear not — your wasted twenties won’t stop you from being a great dad.

To sum up: Both “Knocked Up” and “40-Year Old Virgin” succeeded in making social conservatism seem hip to the youngsters. How? By presenting the audience with comically unrealistic scenarios that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, I’m not the sort of person who obsessively scans over dick-joke movies looking for secret messages that affirm my ideological worldview. However, Big Hollywood and other sites have shown us over the years that there are a lot of crazy people who apparently do this sort of thing on a daily basis. But here’s the catch — if I want this sort of low-grade wingnuttery, I’ll go to those sites and not to the damn New York Times. And look, New York Times, if you’re really intent on publishing cornball Konservetkult Kriticism, you might as well keep it real by publishing this guy:

GI Joe is AWFUL

[…]

This film was marketed as if it could be a pro-American “hoorah” kind of action film. Watching this film, I kept forgetting it was GI Joe. Then, I remembered an angry feeling caming over me. How could they ruin GI Joe? John Nolte said it best, “If it wasn’t for resentment I wouldn’t have felt anything.”

The end of the film leaves a door open for a sequel; in case Hollywood wants to offend America again (we can bet on that!). If Paramount green lights a sequel, let’s hope Michael Bay directs it. He may be a lot of things, but one thing he would never do is strip the patriotism from GI Joe.

As a youngster in the early 1980’s, I remember loving the GI Joe cartoon and action figures immensely. “GO JOE” rings through my head. “A Real American Hero” is what they have always been. That is, until Hollywood got their filthy paws on it.

There is nothing wrong with a group of people from different backgrounds working together, which is what our armed forces are anyway. But why can’t GI Joe still be an all American dream team?

Yeah, see, this is much better. You’ve got hilariously overwrought angst over the unfaithful film adaptation of a crappy ’80s cartoon. You’ve got a thinly-veiled assertion that foreigners are taking all of whitey’s jobs. And best of all, you’ve got a guy getting came on by an angry feeling.

This is how true wingnuttery is done, New York Times. If you want to generate the same level of authenticity in Douthat’s columns, I recommend printing them without running them through a spell checker next time.

 

Sometimes A Picture Is Worth Two Cents And Such. Also.

jim_hoft_bathroom_floor
ABOVE: Jim “Sexy Beast” Hoft

In another universe, far, far, away, the townhall protestors are quiet retiring sorts, Quakers mostly, who sit in on the meetings, waiting their turns to ask questions, after having been savagely beaten and bloodied by ObamaTroopers and union thugs outside the meeting hall. Jim “Gateway Pundit” sends us a dispatch from that parallel universe.

Dems Continue “Listening Tour”– Fists, Boots, Bullhorns, Stomping Heads, Smashing Faces, Assaults Included

I think that post title needs to be fixed:

Dems Continue “Listening Tour”– Fists, Boots, Bullhorns, Machetes, Shoulder-Fired Rocket Launchers, Stomping Heads, Smashing Faces, Lynching Conservatives, Spraying Children With Volleys of Gunfire from AK-47s, Raping Conservative Grandmothers, Blowing Up Conservative Negroes, Decapitations, and Assaults Included!!!!11!!!eleventy-0ne!!

That’s better. Just in case you think Jim is exaggerating, he has pikshurs ‘n such.

Bullhorn Assaults on Little Old Ladies–
bullhorn_old_lady
AIP News reported: Denver’s Organizing for America local chairman blasts a tea party protester with his bullhorn.

OMFG, that man is bullhorning an innocent old lady. Look at the grimace of pain on her face. Dems can never complain about waterboarding ever again! Except, here’s the caption of that photo at Hoft’s link:

Rubber chicken lady has had about enough of him as she gently tries to muffle his noise machine.

Oops. Wrong-way Hoft gets it backwards yet again.

Stomping and kicking black conservatives–
wheelchair
Although he was too weak to speak after his beating on Thursday, black conservative Kenneth Gladney attended the SEIU rally. Kenneth was beaten, kicked and called racist names by Russ Carnahan’s SEIU supporters after a town hall meeting on Thursday.

Go see the shocking video of poor Kenneth for yourself. The savage beating and racial epithets all occur between 0:06 and 0:08. WARNING: the extreme and graphic violence in this video may trigger traumatic reactions in some people.

Bonus stupid: Gladney, who is unemployed, doesn’t have health insurance and is begging for donations to pay for his trip to the emergency room to treat his “injuries.” (H/T to commenters Lesley and Colleen)

It’s no wonder the commies are supporting Dear Leader’s efforts.
CCCP
Commies for “free” health care.

One day we’re Nazis, the next day we’re Commies. It’s hard to keep up. I have a hard enough time trying to figure out whether I’m French, a fag or both without throwing Commie and Nazi into the equation.

But my favorite part of Jim’s post is this section of the comments:

gateway_comments

“Loosers,” “socialist eyes,” a guy with an apelike nym threatening to rip a kids shirt off, and the next commenter calling Obama supporters “violent thugs.” As they say, sometimes the jokes just write themselves.

UPDATE:I cleaned up the Gladney incident video so that you can more clearly see Gladney allegedly being “beaten, kicked and called racist names.” Look at the right hand side and you can see Gladney fall to the ground and then quickly get back up. He’s to the right of the guy in the blue t-shirt. You can then hear him asking the guy in the blue t-shirt why he pulled him down and why he hit his hand. He certainly doesn’t seemed to be so injured that an emergency room visit and wheelchair were in order.

 

Attila The ****

little_miss_attila
ABOVE: Little Miss Attila shows how she keeps people from stealing shit outta her backyard.

Shorter Little Miss Attila, “Little” “Miss” “Attila”
The Bitch Manifesto

  • It’s so unfair that niggers and queers can call themselves niggers and queers, but I can’t. For example, I don’t mind when people call me a cunt and such. However, the word “hate-fucking” completely crosses the line.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™