Sadly, No!

Warner Todd Huston, RedState
Those Dangerous Tea Parties: Are YOU the Threat We’ve Been Waiting For?
Some things we all need to carefully consider before something gets out of hand.

• Grave and ludicrous are these astonishing and maliciously concocted police-state accusations that the right is prone to violence.¹ So in that light, should our tax protests become a terrorist rampage? Not yet, moo hoo haa haa.

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

I observed many years ago that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs fame used to be a decent, if somewhat paranoid, dude who was driven stark raving crazy by 9/11.

Ever since the election of Obama, however, Chaz has suddenly realized that a lot of the people he’s been hanging out with for the past eight years are pretty damn crazy. David Weigel reports:

Johnson has blasted Fox News host Glenn Beck, promoting a video from a Beck-inspired party that shows conservatives ranting about evolution and arguing that “this turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP.”

I’m not sure that Fox News has really “turned toward” right-wing extremism. A more accurate description might be that Fox’s right-wing extremism has intensified over the years to the point where even people such as Charles Johnson start to take notice. But really, anyone who has watched Fox for the last decade knows that it’s been the epicenter of bringing extreme right-wing ideas into mainstream discourse.

Johnson supported Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, but he spent some of the campaign attacking anti-Obama conspiracy theorists, and he rejected the idea that Obama’s designs were malicious, rather than merely naive. Johnson worries, in conversation and on his blog, that his old allies have been duped by far-right European political parties and have bought into wild attacks on the president that discredit their own causes.

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

Noooooooooooooooooooo! What tipped it off? Was it Iron Fist’s fantasies of nuclear genocide? Was it your readers’ iron-clad belief that a crescent-shaped memorial to Flight 93 was really a secret plot to pay tribute to radical Islam? I don’t see how any of these not-at-all-crazy ideas could possibly change your opinion about anything.

The best part comes at the end, where the two LARPers from Gates of Vienna talk about how hard it is being an outright bigot in today’s atmosphere of political correctness (emphasis mine):

Johnson’s former allies can pinpoint the month, if not the moment, when he started to turn on them. In October 2007, some of the leading terrorism-focused conservative bloggers flew to Belgium for aCounterjihad Summit sponsored in part by the Center for Vigilant Freedom (now the International Civil Liberties Alliance), an outgrowth of the LGF-inspired blog Gates of Vienna.

[…]

“He chose to portray the Brussels Conference as evil and he unconscionably slandered the people who attended,” said Dymphna, one of the editors of Gates of Vienna. Baron Bodissey, the other site editor (both editors use pen names), worries that Johnson “did serious damage to the American blogosphere’s view of European nationalists who oppose the EU, even those who have no anti-Semitic tendencies.”

Yeah, you know, it was bad enough when he was just smearing the anti-Semites…

It’s good to remember that back in the early and middle parts of this decade, crazy shit like this ran rampant throughout our mainstream discourse. The fact that Charles Johnson now recognizes it as deranged is symbolic of… something.

Gavin adds: Did somebody say ‘deranged’?

Atlas Shrugs:
Little Green Footballs Charles Johnson Guilty! Neo-nazi Tactics

• I did nothing but promote a video of folks supporting troops, and Charles Johnson has slanderously accused the video of being a British National Party anti-Muslim rally — for it is he who is made of racist accuse-me footage Hitlers. UPDATE: LOL! Look at the hippie fruitcakes protesting the National Front!

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

Shorter Greg Gutfeld:

Daily Guy: The Case for Punching Chavez in the Face

• Once I gave a bully 50 cents, and then he ran over me with his bike. What I learned from this is that Obama, instead of giving Chavez a limp-wristed hand shake, should have cold-cocked Chavez right then and there on the spot. Obama wouldn’t do that because he’s just a girly man with well-sculpted abs, which is so totally gay. Had it been me — a real man’s man who is not at all gay and wouldn’t have even noticed Obama’s well-sculpted abs if the chick I’m banging hadn’t said something to me about them — I would have flattened Chavez. Flattened him like a crêpe quiche frittata. And if you so much as even look at me like you’re thinking that I’m overcompensating, I’ll knock your mother-effing teeth out.

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

Shorter Cap’n Ed Morrissey:

DHS ignored civil-liberties lawyers’ warnings on report; Update: Senators demand data, explanation

• It is ridiculous to blame Bush for commissioning the DHS report, because while the Bush administration might have wanted an assessment of right-wing extremist threats, it would not necessarily have wanted one that blamed it on right-wing extremism.

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

I’m somewhat worried about our friends on the Right:

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.

Workaday labels like “big spender” and “liberal” have lost their punch, and last fall, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gained little traction during the presidential campaign by linking Mr. Obama’s agenda to socialism.

So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”

“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”

For the time being, at least.

Personally speaking, I have no problem with calling people you dislike mean names such as “fascist.” I’m pretty sure I myself have ranted about fascism in regards to the Republican Party at one time or another — it does, in fact, help you blow off steam.

That said, it’s usually pretty wise to save the “fascist” card for when your opponent does something really bad. In the case of Bush, it was when he started a wholly unjustified war with Iraq and when he authorized the torture of prisoners. See, that’s something you can really sink your teeth into.

Keith Olbermann, for instance, first implied that the Bush administration were fascists back in 2006. At that point, the Democrats had been out of power for six years, the Iraq war had fully devolved into the unmitigated disaster that many of us predicted it would become, and Bush was still insisting that Donald Rumsfeld was history’s greatest defense secretary. It was enough to make any normal person go completely bonkers, and calling Bush a “fascist” was a healthy way to vent (though obviously not as healthy as voting the GOP out of power).

The Republicans, on the other hand, have been shut out of power for, what, three months now? And every day I flip on Fox News I see someone calling Obama the nu Hitler who’s a-tryin’ t’ take away yer guns an’ put yer kids inna ree-ed-yoo-cay-shun camp.

Again, I have no problem with calling Obama a Nazi. Free country, free speech and so forth. But from a strategic perspective, you guys will have nowhere else to go if you place all your chips on the Nazi card just three months into the guy’s first term. Once you’ve called someone a fascist, is there anything worse you can call him? Will you start kicking it old-skewl and referring to Obama as an unreconstructed feudalist who wants to turn us in the United Fiefdoms of Amerikkka? Or perhaps a neo-Cromwellite Roundhead who intends burn the Constitution and bring America back to its more theocratic days? What else can you guys call him once the “fascism” play has worn itself out?

A long time ago in a reality far, far away, Jonah Goldberg wrote a book called “Liberal Fascism” in which he posited that liberals were direct ideological descendants of Adolf Hitler because they wanted people to eat vegetables and exercise. I shit you not.

Jonah’s position on exercise is clear: he finds it to be the most horrid form of oppression that can ever be enacted upon another human being and he thus opposes it forthrightly. But when it comes to opposing other things that actual fascists have traditionally approved of — such as, say, state-sanctioned torture — Jonah’s anti-fascist instincts become distinctly more doughy:

Sounds Like Torture to Me [Jonah Goldberg]

I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture.

What’s there to be on the fence about? It’s a technique designed to simulate the sensation of drowning in order to elicit confessions and/or intelligence. I’ve personally never been drowned before, but I have inside sources who tell me that it’s really fucking painful. Ergo, to waterboard is to intentionally inflict pain upon a prisoner in order to get information from them. Which is, uh, TORTURE.

But if the reports are true that the CIA used it scores of times in a single month on a single prisoner, than I think the threshhold has been met. Debating wether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts. But I think waterboarding someone 183 times in a month does amount to torture no matter how you slice it.

At first glance, it seems that Jonah has made a breakthrough: he has concluded that torturing someone repeatedly over the span of a month does amount to torture. But sadly, no. A reader walks Jonah back through the magical powers of bullshit:

Wheeler and others are claiming that the 183 tally blows through the above limits, as even two sessions a day, times five days, times up to six 10-second applications per session, totals a maximum of 60 applications of water. And if KSM was in fact only subjected to one session per day on each of the five days he was waterboarded, then he should have maxed out at 30. But Wheeler and such simply aren’t reading the guidelines correctly. The limits of six applications of water is for applications lasting 10 seconds or longer. There is no limit on shorter applications, except for the cumulative 12-minutes of water per 24-hour period, toward which each short application would also apply.

So it’s more than possible to have 183 applications of water while still adhering to the guidelines, with applications under 10 seconds making up the great majority of the 183.

And thus, the question of whether or not torture is right or wrong gets reduced to an “angels dancing on the head of a pin question.” As in, “Well, if he was tortured only 50 times in month and for only short periods, that’s not really torture and bwah-ha-ha, liberals you’re wrong again, now we can authorize smashing peoples’ hands in with bricks!” After which Jonah will write a post at the Corner that begins with, “I’ve always been on the fence about whether smashing prisoners’ hands with bricks constitutes torture…” and the glorious cycle will repeat itself.

It’s hard to account for the cheap shots that thoughtful observers have leveled at Jonah Goldberg since the Whitewater and Lewinsky follies brought him before us. By this I mean that no, it’s easy to account for them, because Jonah’s career as a public intellectual suggests a Crank Yankers puppet that calls people up pretending to be George Will. His kulturkritik suggests a guy up past midnight watching Dark Side of Oz, smoking a bong with no pot in it. We should what, waste on him the expensive shots?

But in a world such as this one, befudged as it is with Crittendens, with Donald Douglases, R.S. McCains, Höfte, Althäuser, Hinderåkern,¹ and Yoshida-tachi, Jonah seems to attract abuse disproportionate to the amount of human spirit that his work forever consumes, for reading him leaves us relatively less bleakened and dust-blown, less incrementally lost to mercy and self-reflection, than the work — not to name-drop too thickly — of for instance Victor Davis Hanson, whose late career resembles a series of crank calls from Allan Bloom pretending to be Squidward.

All this is by way of saying that Jonah has sometimes been unfairly singled out for wedgies because of his intrinsic wedgability, which has made it incompletely satisfying, these days, to see him tossed from a helicopter with a parachute attached to the rear waistband of his Stormfronts.² And alas, in one post at The Corner, Jonah has managed to produce five separate things that are each the stupidest thing ever said, including the other four things.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg:

Taxes & Tyranny

• Liberals complain that our apocalyptic screaming about Nazi communist death-camp tyranny is overwrought. Some is, but if the government confiscates 37% of your money, it is like being in 37% of a Nazi communist death camp.

Taxes & Tyranny

• Liberals complain that our cry of ‘taxation without representation’ is really just about losing the election. Maybe so, but not if ‘taxation without representation’ also includes people not born yet — plus, the socialist conspiracy to loot America is irksome.

Taxes & Tyranny

• Liberals say these protests are unpatriotic Astroturfing by plutocrats. I find it amazing that leftist groups can openly organize protests while ordinary Americans, lobbyists, and TV networks can’t even get together covertly.

Taxes & Tyranny

• Liberals complain that we are hypocrites for suddenly caring about deficits. Maybe so, but they are hypocrites for caring about Bush’s tiny deficits for wars, and then wanting to fix health care.

Taxes & Tyranny

• Liberals say that our populist anger is the real face of America’s homegrown fascism. This is silly because certain elements of our radically inconsistent ideology are quite unlike the notorious misreading of fascism in the book I wrote that blames fascism on liberals.

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

¹ Apparently from the Swedish, meaning “obstacle field,” but also translatable, as though God had gotten tired of hanging out in the golden ratio and the repeating decimal and started inhabiting the petty humiliation of conservatives, as “butt slip-and-fall.”
² This is a term for ‘tighty whiteys’ that doesn’t have any specific joke attached to it yet, but seems very promising.

Mark McGrew, who writes for the online wingnut edition of Pravda, is over today at Renew America with perhaps the most awesome headline in the history of the right-wing blogosphere:

CNN and MSNBC: sexual degenerates and liars

I really need to watch more CNN and MSNBC because I’ve obviously missed all the good stuff. About the only sexual degeneracy I ever see on either is the occassional Sham-Wow! commercial or that sleeping pill ad with the lady who wakes up with a cock in her bed. Hardly enough to pique the interest of an old roué like myself.

But then, as I excitedly devoured McGrew’s article, looking for the steamy details of Anderson Cooper in the shower with the falafel, it became clear that the only degeneracy involved was, sigh, a double entendre. Fuck me, as my grandmother used to say.

But the most despicable actions of the spit-polished, shiny-faced, smiling-Jack newscasters were their steady bombardment of their viewers with sexually depraved insults against the protesters. …

The term “Teabagging” will not be explained here. Adults will figure it out and children don’t need to know. Most of us had no idea what it was, until having the term constantly shouted at us by Major News degenerates. …

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper made “teabagging” references while the CNN analyst, David Gergen, made snide comments about Republicans “searching for their voice.” And “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”

Of course, after complaining that Ana Marie Cox and Rachel Maddow used the term “teabagging” on air more than 50 times, Mr. McGrew feels compelled to use it ten times in his article, carefully detailing all the naughty references to the “degenerate” act, with more enthusiasm than seems appropriate for a guy purported to be shocked to his moral core by all this pornographic punning. (He’s rather like the guy who says that giving head isn’t gay if your real purpose is the nutritional payoff of the act.)

But the real cock-slap in the face, to McGrew, was this vile act:

Ana Marie Cox informed an unknowing audience, with no room for doubt that she is one sick cookie, when she told us to see Urbandictionary.com for the term “teabagging.”

And the next thing McGrew knew he felt compelled to give his wife a cincinatti bowtie, which never would have happened if that “sick cookie” had never told him about Urbandictionary.com.

These people brought … sexual acts into your living room, shouting out a sexual term that few of us knew, until we and our children were shown where to find the defintion of “Teabagging.” What else, besides lies and pornography, will they expose our children to? Anything they want, and you won’t know it until it is too late.

Yeah, and the next time old Dirty Rick Sanchez appears on CNN, your kids will sneak off into the toolshed and come back with mustaches.

Posted without comment for your Sunday morning breakfast (biscuits and gravy, no doubt) reading. Enjoy!

PLAYBOY: In Fight Club Tyler Durden pees into the soup he’s serving and farts on the food. Do you know people who have done that?

PALAHNIUK: I know people who worked at the big hotels in downtown Portland, and yeah, they would tell stories like that. There was a kid in England — a very handsome, well-presented kid — who told me, “I work in an upscale restaurant in London, and we do things to celebrities’ food all the time.” I said, “Tell me one person.” He said, “I can’t because there are only two of these restaurants, and it’d be too easy to find me.” I wasn’t going to sign his book until he told me one person. So he sheepishly goes, “Margaret Thatcher has eaten my sperm.” I started laughing. As soon as I did, he got bold. He said, “At least five times.”

So once again we see what happens when one tries to use Rush, the band, as a guide for wise living.

You can listen to the freaking oak trees if you want, and let them shade out your entire vegetable garden, but I finally got fed up today and went out to the scraggly weed patch where the garden used to be, and I was like, “Hey, remind me. I shouldn’t trim the crap out you because…? And they were all like, “This is a violation of our rights,” and “You’re punishing success,” and “The taller shall not be ruled by the shorter.” So I pull-started the chainsaw and started trimming, and they yelled and sent all their squirrels snarling down, and long story short, the tip for wise living this time was that if someone comes over and finds you out back chainsawing squirrels in a rain of green acorns, don’t be naïve and think the oaks won’t be all, “Uh, we just got here.” “Take more acorns, sir, but spare these hamsters.” “Hi, what are you guys looking oh my God…”

And if you want, you can place your trust in the veritable Nash Equilibrium of Canadian prog-rock, that bongwater apicality of all Neil Peart, as it were, philo-sophisms, the Free Will Observation; but as for me, I would suspect that if you choose not to decide, you still in fact have not made a choice. Paradox? Yeah, as if you couldn’t tell yourself not to talk, or imagine not imagining something. For example, I imagined a few seconds ago that I’d let a sentence go off on its own like this, and as it wore on, I’d be watching each new clause unscroll without anything really happening, or no, okay, here’s a one-panel cartoon: A couple preparing for a party is startled by a guest arriving early — the scene would be something like the husband in an apron holding a fondue pot, and the wife in a shower cap leaning out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam — and the caption is something like, “Cripes, is that Godot already?” Yeah, you see, it looked sort of promising there for a moment, but nothing really came of it. I didn’t imagine any kind of punch line here either.

So briefly, it comes again to a decision, as opposed to what Neil Peart does when confronted with a choice of white rice or fried rice with his order, which is to appear in the next frame as a spider-webbed skeleton in a Sabian cymbals shirt, staring with a comically gaping jaw at a skeleton with a Fu Manchu mustache and a towel over its arm. It’s what to do first with the post that’s hanging alarmingly out in the breeze with a ‘continued shortly’ notice on it.

After Party

And this wasn’t the easy choice, by the way. This is the after-action message from the organizers of the Tea Party that took place at Boston Common, and let’s look at how that whole thing came together, while the conversation on such things is still vital.

Thank you all for coming out and making this an awesome event! The Boston Common tea party drew over a thousand protestors, and Michael Graham’s event at Boston Harbour drew 1,500 patriots. Thank you for bringing your energy, your passion, and your love of this great country to Boston Common and Christopher Columbus park.

Read the rest of this entry »